Annalena Charlotte Alma Baerbock (; born 15 December 1980) is a German diplomat and politician of the Alliance 90/The Greens party. She served as Germany's Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2021 to 2025 and was President of the United Nations General Assembly during its 80th session from September 2025 to September 2026.
From 2018 to January 2022, Baerbock served as co-leader of Alliance 90/The Greens, alongside Robert Habeck. She was the party's candidate for chancellor in the 2021 federal election. Olaf Scholz from SPD secured the chancellery instead of Baerbock. After the election, the Greens formed a traffic light coalition led by Olaf Scholz, and Baerbock was sworn in as Germany's first female foreign minister on 8 December 2021.
Born in Hanover, West Germany, in 1980, Baerbock attended the University of Hamburg and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was first elected to the Bundestag in 2013. From 2012 to 2015, she was a member of the party council of Alliance 90/The Greens and from 2009 to 2013, the leader of her party's group in the state of Brandenburg.
Early life and education Baerbock is the daughter of a social worker and a mechanical engineer who worked for the US-based WABCO Vehicle Control Systems. Her family lived in Nuremberg for several years during her early childhood years, then moved to Schulenburg, which is part of Pattensen, near Hanover in Lower Saxony. There she grew up in an old reconstructed farmhouse with her two sisters and two cousins. As a child, she joined her parents at anti-war and anti-nuclear power protests organized or supported by the Green Party. She attended the Humboldt School in Hanover and at the age of 16 spent an exchange year in the United States at Lake Highland Preparatory School in Orlando, Florida.
As a teenager, Baerbock was a competitive trampoline gymnast, taking part in German championships and winning bronze three times.
From 2000 to 2004, Baerbock studied political science at the University of Hamburg, where she qualified for a pre-diploma ().
From 2000 to 2003, Baerbock also worked as a journalist for the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung. She completed internships at Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Deutsche Presseagentur and the Council of Europe.
In 2005, Baerbock completed a one-year master's course in public international law at the London School of Economics (LSE). During her time at LSE, she stayed at Carr-Saunders Hall in Fitzrovia. In 2005, she was a trainee at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL). She also started a dissertation on natural disasters and humanitarian aid at the Free University of Berlin, but did not finish it.
Early career After her studies, Baerbock worked from 2005 to 2008 in the office of MEP Elisabeth Schroedter. In 2008 and 2009, she worked as an adviser on foreign and security policies for the parliamentary group of the Alliance 90/The Greens in the Bundestag.
Political career Beginnings
Baerbock became a member of Alliance 90/The Greens in 2005. In October 2008, she was elected to the executive board of her party's state group in Brandenburg. The next year she succeeded Ska Keller as co-chair of the board (with Benjamin Raschke), an office she held until 2013.
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.
During her first term, Baerbock was a member of the Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy and the Committee on European Affairs. In her parliamentary group, she served as speaker for climate policy. In the latter capacity, she participated in the United Nations Climate Change Conferences in Warsaw (2013), Lima (2014), Paris (2015) and Marrakesh (2016).
Baerbock served as deputy chair of the Berlin-Taipei Parliamentary Circle of Friends and a member of the German-Polish Parliamentary Friendship Group from 2014 until 2017.
In the 2017 election, Baerbock was again the leading candidate in the state of Brandenburg, retaining her seat in Parliament. After the election, she was a member of the Green Party's negotiating team in the (unsuccessful) coalition talks with the CDU/CSU and FDP. 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
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. She won 64% of the vote, more than her challenger, Anja Piel. At a 2019 party convention, she was re-elected with 97.1% of the votes, the highest-ever result for a party chair.
In the negotiations to form a coalition government under the leadership of Minister-President of Brandenburg Dietmar Woidke after the 2019 state elections, Baerbock was a member of her party's delegation.
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. Similarly, statements about her education were misleading and her professional career incorrect. 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 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." She warned that Turkey's threat to launch a new offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria will only help the Islamic State jihadists.
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.