Do we like them?Do we like Annalena Baerbock?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Her record is on the right side for LGBTQ+ people, women and climate, with a contested Gaza stance and a couple of stumbles, but I couldn't read as deeply as I wanted.
Annalena Baerbock came up through the German Greens and became the party's first candidate for chancellor from its ranks in 2021, then Germany's first female foreign minister. In June 2025 the UN General Assembly elected her its president for the 80th session, with the post running for one year. So she's been a career politician and diplomat for more than a decade, not a celebrity.
Her signature move as foreign minister was a 'feminist foreign policy', with guidelines released in March 2023. Reporting at the time described it as aimed at women's rights, representation and resources, and it also named backing for LGBTQI+ communities. Conservative outlets mocked it. On the harm test, that's the right side of the ledger.
The harm check on Gaza is where it gets contested. Germany under her kept up its support for Israel after the October 2023 attacks, and by January 2024 reporting described Berlin recalibrating as the Palestinian death toll climbed. Critics on the left say her government was too slow to push for a ceasefire. Critics on the other side say she leaned on Israel too hard. Where you land depends on which of those you find more persuasive, and it keeps this at an asterisk rather than a clean pass.
Her 2021 chancellor run hit turbulence over her book 'Jetzt'. An Austrian researcher flagged passages that appeared to have been taken from other sources without credit. Baerbock first rejected the claims, then acknowledged there had been mistakes in the book. It's a stumble from the campaign trail rather than a pattern, and it didn't stop her getting the top job at the foreign ministry.
The recent thing: on 3 June 2026 Germany lost its bid for a UN Security Council seat for 2027 to 2028, and Baerbock, as General Assembly president, was in the chair for the vote. Her appointment to the UN post had already drawn criticism at home, because a career diplomat had been expected to get it. Whether the defeat is on her is a domestic political fight, and I couldn't confirm how much of the blame is fair.
The good stuff is mostly institutional: pushing multilateralism, human rights and climate policy as foreign minister, and a feminist foreign policy that put LGBTQI+ protection into a government document. That's real, but it's policy rather than personal acts of kindness, and I couldn't find charity or acts of personal sacrifice to add. Nothing newer than the June vote turned up in what I could read, so call this a sound but not exhaustive read.