Annalena Baerbock knows how to land on her feet. Just a few weeks after it became clear that her Green Party was unlikely to be part of the next German government, the country's first-ever female foreign minister was already lining up a new job.

The UN General Assembly elected her on Monday, June 2. She ran unopposed for the one-year top position, which is primarily of ceremonial significance and mainly involves organizing plenary sessions. The inauguration is due to take place on September 9, shortly before the general debate of the UN General Assembly — and while the job is limited to a year, it is considered a good stepping stone for subsequent roles.

Baerbock's appointment ruffled feathers

When Germany's former center-left government nominated Baerbock as the new president of the United Nations General Assembly, a post that Germany was next in line to occupy, government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit said Baerbock was highly respected and "highly qualified for the job." 

The appointment did not come without some internal grievance: Germany had said last year that it would nominate the much-respected diplomat Helga Schmid for the post. A former Green Party member, Schmid is a Foreign Ministry veteran and was considered a vital architect of the nuclear agreement between Iran, the EU and other states, concluded in 2015.

Baerbock responded to the criticism saying her appointment was be "analogous to many predecessors who were also former foreign ministers or former prime ministers."

Baerbock, still only 44, was foreign minister until the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) , Christian Social Union (CSU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) negotiated their way to Germany's new government.

At least rhetorically, Baerbock always remained committed to the "value-based foreign policy" she said she wanted to enact even before she took office. As the Green Party's chancellor candidate in 2021, she made what many saw as assertive statements about human rights and democratic freedoms in China, Belarus, Hungary, and Russia.

Baerbock in office

But her outspokenness often did not go down well later, when she took office. Her ministry was forced to clarify a remark she made during a meeting of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in January 2023, when, during a call for unity among western allies, she said, in English: "We are fighting a war against Russia, not against each other." This was immediately pounced on by the Russian government, when spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed that this was proof that the West was waging a "premeditated war against Russia."

Then in April 2023, during a press conference with her Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing, she offered a note of warning about China's international ambitions, only to be told by Qin that the "last thing that China needs is a teacher from the West."

Nor did it help Chinese-German relations when, in an interview with US broadcaster Fox News in September 2023, she described Xi Jinping as a "dictator," which led the Chinese government to summon Germany's ambassador to Beijing.

Overall, Baerbock's three years as foreign minister were marked by momentous international crises, which necessitated a tireless work rate: She made a total of 160 trips in her time in office, visiting some 77 countries — face-to-face diplomacy had never been more necessary, she once told public broadcaster ARD.

During her time in office, she showed herself a strong supporter of sending military supplies to Ukraine, a country she visited nine times — including visits to Ukrainian troops on the front.

Following the October 7, 2023 attacks by the terror group Hamas, Baerbock attempted to walk a line between expressing Germany's continued support for Israel, while also trying to negotiate humanitarian aid for Gaza.

She also attempted to enact a more "feminist" foreign policy, something she expressed by increasing the proportion of female officials in her own ministry, as well as in German embassies around the world, a third of which are now headed by women.

Baerbock's rise

Baerbock's political career was marked in her youth by her parents, who took her on anti-nuclear demos in the 1980s. On her personal website, she describes being "touched by worldwide injustice" since her teenage years, which she said sparked early ambitions to be a journalist.

She studied political science and public law in Hamburg, earned a master's degree in international law at the London School of Economics, and then began a doctorate at Berlin's Free University, which she broke off in 2013 on being elected to the Bundestag.

Her academic career ran in parallel to a steep political ascent. Having joined the Green Party at the age of 25, she became leader of the party in the state of Brandenburg only four years later, while simultaneously acting as spokesperson of the party's working group on European affairs and serving as a board member of the European Green Party.

She continued this focus on European affairs in her first term in the Bundestag, when she claims to have "worked hard on making the German government finally acknowledge its international responsibility as one of the largest economies in the world and to lead the German 'energy transition'."

Her rise continued into April 2021, when she won an internal power struggle against her Green Party co-leader Robert Habeck, and became the party's first-ever official chancellor candidate in a national election campaign. Her candidacy was undermined however, when it emerged that her ghost writer had plagiarized parts of her hastily-released book. Though her party's election result that year was a disappointment, it set her on her course into foreign diplomacy.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

This text was first published in 2021 and has been updated to reflect recent news developments.

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