Beginnings Baerbock became a member of
Alliance 90/The Greens in 2005. Baerbock served as the national spokesperson for the Green Party's working group on European affairs from 2008 to 2013. From 2009 to 2012, she was a member of the executive board of the
European Green Party, under the leadership of co-chairs
Philippe Lamberts and
Monica Frassoni.
Member of the German Bundestag: 2013–2025 In 2009, Baerbock unsuccessfully ran for a place on her party's electoral list for the federal elections. In 2013, she was the Green Party candidate in the constituency of
Potsdam – Potsdam-Mittelmark II – Teltow-Fläming II and also secured the leading spot on the
party's electoral list for the State of Brandenburg. Through the electoral list, she became a member of the Bundestag. She has since been a member of the Committee on Families, Seniors, Women and Youth. Baerbock retained her seat, again as leading candidate on the Brandenburg party list, in the
2021 and
2025 elections. She resigned as member of the Bundestag, effective 30 June 2025, following the nomination to a position with the
United Nations.
Co-leader of the Green Party: 2018–2022 , October 2020 On 27 January 2018, at the Green Party's national convention in her hometown of
Hanover, Baerbock was elected as one of two equal chairpersons of her party at the federal level, with
Robert Habeck.
Chancellor candidate: 2021 On 19 April 2021, the federal board of the Greens officially nominated Baerbock as
candidate for
chancellor for the
2021 federal electionthe first time the party had nominated a single candidate instead of co-leaders. This was formally confirmed at the party congress from 11 to 13 June. Baerbock is the second woman after
Angela Merkel to seek the highest government office, and the first woman nominated by her party. On election day, she was only 12 days older than
Guido Westerwelle in 2002, the youngest chancellor candidate ever. On 12 June 2021, Baerbock was confirmed as candidate for chancellor after receiving 98.5% of the confirmation votes. In the
2021 German federal election, she again ran in the
constituency of
Potsdam – Potsdam-Mittelmark II – Teltow-Fläming II, this time against fellow chancellor candidate
Olaf Scholz. She lost the constituency to Scholz by over 15,000 votes, but was nonetheless elected to the Bundestag through the Green list in Brandenburg. During this time,
plagiarism by Baerbock in her 2021 book () came to light, with Baerbock becoming the latest in a series of German politicians found to have plagiarised since the
2011-Guttenberg scandal. In the book, Baerbock included work of other authors without attributing that work to them thereby falsely presenting it as her own, with one researcher,
Stefan Weber, detailing 100 instances of plagiarism before ceasing to look further. Around the same time, scrutiny of Baerbock's published
CV revealed falsehoods. For example, Baerbock claimed membership of the
German Marshall Fund and
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees when she, in fact, was not a member. While she did have associations with these and other minor institutions, the claims in her CV were exaggerated. These revelations triggered widespread condemnation in the German public. According to studies conducted by the German Marshall Fund and the
Institute for Strategic Dialogue, both German and Russian state-backed sources have targeted Baerbock, spreading a large amount of disinformation, from false assumptions about the Greens to explicit sexism, such as the circulated online image featuring Baerbock's face photoshopped onto a naked female body with the caption "I was young and I needed the money". Under Baerbock's leadership, the Greens won 14.8% of the national vote in 2021 and 118 seats in the Bundestag, the best result in the party's history. However, the performance was considered somewhat disappointing as the party finished third after having led in some polls earlier in the year.
Foreign minister: 2021–2025 Before the
2021 election,
Wolfgang Streeck wrote that Baerbock harboured strong
Atlanticist and pro-
NATO views and would follow a foreign policy aligned with that of U.S. President
Joe Biden. Following the 2021 German federal election, the Greens agreed to enter government with the
FDP and the
Social Democrats, as part of a
traffic light coalition led by
Olaf Scholz. Baerbock was named
Foreign Minister and took office on 8 December 2021, the first woman ever to hold the role. Baerbock visited Warsaw in December 2021 to meet with the Polish Foreign Minister
Zbigniew Rau. They discussed Poland's
dispute with the EU over the rule of law and the superiority of
European Union law. Baerbock backed
Poland's efforts to stop the flow of
migrants seeking entry in EU territories from Belarus. She rejected the notion of Germany paying further
World War II reparations to Poland. Germany asserts that Poland renounced all reparation rights under a 1953 agreement and that the dispute is settled. Poland rejects this view, stating that
the Polish government was then under the sway of the Soviet Union and that its 1953 agreement is non-binding, somewhat similar to the manner in which
German reunification was predicated upon Germany's renouncing explicitly any possible claims to the
former eastern territories of Germany including
East Prussia, most of
Silesia, as well as the eastern parts of
Brandenburg and
Pomerania in the
Two Plus Four Agreement. On 23 December 2021, Baerbock warned that
Afghanistan is "heading into the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our time", with major
economic sectors collapsing and more than 24 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. She said, "We cannot allow hundreds of thousands of children to die because we don't want to take action." She also promised to speed up the
evacuation of more than 15,000 vulnerable Afghans, including staff who worked for Germany and their family members. When Germany held the rotating presidency of the
Group of Seven (G7) in 2022, Baerbock chaired the meetings of G7 Ministers of Foreign Affairs. in Kyiv, on 7 February 2022 In January 2022, Baerbock refused to
supply German weapons to Ukraine amid rising tensions on the Ukraine-Russia border, while the
NATO allies including the United States opted to send arms in support of Ukraine. In the aftermath of the
Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she argued against
blocking Russian access to SWIFT. Following the
Bucha massacre in April 2022, she expelled 40 Russian diplomats and embassy staff from Berlin, joining other European Union countries in their response to
war crimes perpetrated by Russian troops in Ukraine. Also in April 2022, she hosted a donor conference during which European and international governments agreed to extend () in aid to
Moldova, which hosted more than 100,000 refugees from Ukraine at the time. In July 2022, she rejected
Turkey's
territorial claims to
Greek islands in the
Aegean Sea, stating that "
Lesbos,
Chios,
Rhodes and many others are
Greek territories and nobody has the right to question them." In January 2023, Baerbock and French Foreign Minister
Catherine Colonna arrived in
Ethiopia and met Ethiopian Prime Minister
Abiy Ahmed on a mission to support the
Ethiopia–Tigray peace agreement ending the
Tigray War. In January 2023, Baerbock made her third visit to Ukraine by touring
Kharkiv, following her travels to
Bucha in May and
Kyiv in September of the previous year. In a keynote speech to the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 24 January, she said in English "We are fighting a war against Russia, not against each other", which was critically portrayed in the popular tabloid newspaper
Bild with the headline "We are at war with Russia". Her phrasing received criticism from conservative and right-wing politicians in Germany as demonstrating un-professionalism, and criticism from Russia. A German Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Germany was not a party to the conflict and the speech was in a context of establishing a unified stance in opposition to a war of aggression. In March 2023, on a visit to
Baghdad, Baerbock called on Iran to cease
its missile attacks on Iraqi territory. In May 2023, she urged China to take a
clear stance on the
Russo-Ukrainian War, saying "neutrality means taking the side of the aggressor.", after the
General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping first visited Vladimir Putin in Russia, and later on the next day visited Ukraine, with offending
Russian dissidents and opponents of Vladimir Putin while being in Ukraine. In September 2023, she named the
CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping "a dictator" next to Russian President
Vladimir Putin, that followed the U.S. President
Joe Biden referring to Xi "a dictator" in June. on 4 November 2023 In May 2023, she visited
Saudi Arabia and praised Saudi efforts to find a solution to the
wars in Yemen and
Sudan. After on 6 July 2023, U.S. President
Joe Biden authorized the provision of
cluster munitions to Ukraine in support of a
Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russian forces in
Russian-occupied regions in Southeastern Ukraine Baerbock opposed the decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine. In September 2023, Baerbock accused
Azerbaijan of breaking its promise not to resort to military action in
Armenian-held Nagorno-Karabakh and called on it to halt the
offensive and return to negotiations. In February 2024, she played host to the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia for two days of peace talks in Berlin. During the
Gaza war, Baerbock expressed support for
Israel and its right to self-defense. On 11 November 2023, she visited Israel to express solidarity with the country. Baerbock rejected calls for a ceasefire but supported "humanitarian pauses" to deliver aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. She stated that "For Germany, Israel's security is non-negotiable." She pointed to
Germany's "historic and moral responsibility to the Jewish people and the Israeli state" because of
the Holocaust. She and UK Foreign Secretary
David Cameron wrote a joint article published in
The Sunday Times on 17 December 2023 calling for actions which would "pav[e] the way to a sustainable ceasefire in Gaza". ,
Saudi Arabia on 12 January 2025
Francesca Albanese, incumbent
UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, criticised Baerbock following Baerbock's speech in the German Bundestag on 7 October 2024, in which she alluded to
Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilian sites as "self-defense" and said that "that's what Germany stands for". Though civilian sites can lose protected status if used for military purposes, under
international law they still cannot be attacked if the harm to civilians will be disproportionate. Furthermore, Article 52 of the Protocol Additional to the
Geneva Conventions states that “In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used”. In January 2025, Baerbock and her French counterpart
Jean-Noël Barrot visited Damascus to meet
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the
de facto leader of Syria since December 2024, on behalf of the European Union, thereby becoming the first ministers from the EU to visit the country since the
fall of the Assad regime. Despite shaking hands with Jean-Noël Barrot, al-Sharaa did not shake hands with Baerbock.
President of the United Nations General Assembly: 2025–present In June 2025 Baerbock was elected to serve as
President of the United Nations General Assembly during its
80th session, despite controversies. In an unusual
secret-ballot vote demanded by Russia, she received 167 of the 193 votes cast (with 14 abstentions and 7 votes for the write-in candidate
Helga Schmid). Baerbock's surprise candidacy displaced Schmid, one of Germany's most respected diplomats—who had already been nominated and interviewed for the position. For months Germany had originally intended to nominate Schmid for the assembly presidency but replaced her with Baerbock after she lost her job in the outgoing minority government. The decision drew criticism in Germany and internationally. Baerbock replaced President of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)
Philémon Yang, a former prime minister of
Cameroon and on 9 September 2025 assumed her functions. == Political positions ==