Diplomatic Humiliation: Germany Suffers First UN Security Council Defeat
The failed bid is a slap in the face for Germany, who have successfully won a seat in their last six attempts and who consider themselves a major player on the world stage.
It would be hard to say they didn't have it coming. For those of us who live here, it has sometimes been hard to determine exactly how Germany's international reputation is standing after these last few years. We're too close to it, so it has been difficult to know whether the world has seen everything that we've seen. Did the rest of the world notice when Berlin police brutalised protestors at pro-Palestinian demonstrations? When they tried to ban protest outright and criminalised foreign languages at them? Did they notice the blatant double standard in international policy: forthrightly defending the rights of Ukraine (who else remembers the Greens' "feminist foreign policy"?) but then either complicit in Gaza, largely silent when it comes to US attacks on Iran, or Chancellor Friedrich Merz simply stating that "passing legal judgement is complex" when the US abducted Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela.
Well, it looks like the rest of the world did notice that, too. They have now handed Germany a huge diplomatic embarrassment on the world stage.
They didn't just lose, they lost badly.