Germany’s sharp-tongued Annalena Baerbock rips up the diplomatic playbook

BERLIN — Annalena Baerbock is ready to fight — against autocracies and her own chancellor.

Standing beside her Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing, the German foreign minister voiced a few appreciative remarks about China’s rise to the top world powers before turning up the heat on her host.

“Many in the world are asking how China will use this growing influence,” Baerbock said at the press conference in the palatial Diaoyutai state guesthouse earlier this month. “I have to say frankly, I wonder why the Chinese position has so far not included a call upon the aggressor Russia to stop the war.”

Along with Baerbock’s broadside against Beijing over its (not-so-indirect) support for Russia’s war in Ukraine came warnings to China that an escalation against Taiwan would amount to “a horror scenario,” as well as criticism over Chinese human rights violations. What had started friendly quickly descended into a tense meeting, with Qin snapping back: “What China needs least is a schoolmaster from the West.”

For Baerbock, the clash of words was a continuation of a new foreign policy style she has cultivated since taking up office one-and-a-half years ago. Vowing a tougher line against authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes, this has also seen her trading barbs with counterparts from Russia and Turkey.

Baerbock’s blunt language, which ignores the risk of antagonizing China as Germany’s biggest trading partner, stands in contrast to the more sober and at times robotic rhetoric of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — who had also raised Taiwan and human rights during his visit to Beijing last year.

On her trip to China, she also distanced herself (and by extension, the EU) from controversial remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron on staying out of any potential conflict over Taiwan.

The visit underlined how well the senior Green politician, who two years ago botched her bid to become chancellor, has adjusted to representing Germany abroad. The popularity of her plain-text approach has motivated Baerbock to consider a repeat run for chancellor against Scholz in the 2025 election — despite an apparent rivalry with former Green Party co-leader Robert Habeck.

Questions remain, however, about her chances in light of a history of gaffes as well as her Green party’s recent slump in polls.

“She is convinced that clear words also stand out in order to be taken seriously,” said Jamila Schäfer, a Green party foreign policy lawmaker who has known Baerbock for many years.

Schäfer described how German politicians had long been “much more cautious in addressing problems [in other countries], prioritizing investments and the short-term interests of individual large corporations.”

“This has changed with Baerbock,” Schäfer said.

Rewriting the diplomatic code

So far, even the opposition in Berlin is praising her combative style: “Finally, after two rather questionable visits by Macron recently and Scholz last year, a clear and forceful European position on China,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a prominent foreign and security policy lawmaker in Germany from the center-right Christian Democratic Union.

Baerbock’s sharp rhetoric, as well as her high prominence in Germany and abroad, are strikingly different from the lackluster performance of her predecessor Heiko Maas. The Social Democrat at one point even publicly apologized to Saudi Arabia for German criticism on human rights and democracy issues. Maas, largely unknown in the international sphere, is often blamed for having done little to stop former chancellor Angela Merkel from downgrading the foreign ministry.

Michael Roth, the chair of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee and a former state secretary in the foreign ministry, said that such a paradigm shift was long overdue.

“The traditional language of diplomacy, with its sometimes very subtle formulations — ‘we are concerned, we are very concerned’ — suffers from the fact that it is no longer properly understood: Neither by the citizens in this country, nor by the authoritarian rulers who cultivate an increasingly aggressive rhetoric,” said Roth, from Scholz’s Social Democratic Party. “Saying things clearly helps to counter that,” Roth added.

Baerbock — who came into office with no previous governmental experience — left her first big positive mark on the international scene when, still before the Russian invasion and only in her second month as minister, she emerged as the clear victor in a tense verbal duel at a news conference with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov. Just one year earlier, Lavrov had brutally humiliated the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in a similar situation.

During last year’s COP27 climate talks in Egypt, Baerbock — who extended her portfolio by making climate protection a foreign affairs issue and hiring ex-Greenpeace chief Jennifer Morgan as state secretary — challenged China by loudly demanding more engagement on reducing emissions, saying that Beijing could no longer hide behind a decades-old classification as a developing nation.

At a parliamentary debate last week, the 42-year-old politician doubled down on her critical stance toward Beijing, saying she had witnessed “really more than shocking” Chinese repression of citizens during her recent visit.

Toxic relationship

Although Baerbock’s allies insist her tougher language comes from pure conviction, it has also been a way for her to assert influence in the court of Scholz. With the war in Ukraine, the chancellor has shown significant interest in setting the tone on foreign policy — not least through his Zeitenwende shift in foreign and security policy, proclaimed mere days after Russia’s invasion last year.

Scholz has been jetting around the globe a lot — to China, Japan, India, the U.S., South America; and in early May, he will go to Africa for the second time. During these visits, foreign policy questions such as how to deal with Russian aggression and China’s rise have been at the top of the agenda.

Baerbock, sidelined by the high-level diplomacy of her boss, made headlines last year by admonishing Scholz ahead of his China trip to stay tough on Beijing.

Relations between the chancellor and his foreign minister reached a critical point earlier this year amid the protracted debate around sending German battle tanks to Ukraine, during which Baerbock constantly pushed Scholz to stop hesitating, while the latter kept the final decision close to his chest.

They also clashed over money, power and their respective turfs under Germany’s planned national security strategy, with Baerbock’s Greens accusing the chancellery of trying to set up a “shadow foreign ministry.” A forthcoming China strategy has as well been a sticking point, with the chancellery pushing to water down a more critical first draft by the foreign ministry.

By February, Baerbock’s allies even accused Scholz’s entourage of providing journalists with negative spin over Baerbock to influence media coverage to her disadvantage.

The toxic relationship between the two politicians has since only slightly improved, and was challenged again last week as lawmakers from Scholz’s SPD criticized the foreign minister’s China policy while she was visiting the country.

Beyond that clash, questions also remain over how effectively Baerbock can shape German foreign policy, as Scholz and his powerful right-hand man Wolfgang Schmidt take the big decisions and are constantly rivaling her when it comes to setting the tone on foreign policy.

More broadly, tensions between Scholz and Baerbock are likely to rise further as Germany gears up for its next election in October 2025.

Popularity contest

Baerbock, who declined to be interviewed for this article, citing her tight schedule, so far hasn’t commented on her potential candidature for the 2025 election. The topic is highly sensitive due to another issue: inner-party rivalry. The Greens’ Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck is also keen to clinch the top position.

Although Habeck was a leading candidate for the Greens in the 2021 election, as an implicit statement on gender parity, the party ultimately selected Baerbock. Her subsequent election campaign, however, became a fiasco amid various gaffes, criticism over an exaggerated CV as well as accusations of plagiarism — all of which caused the Greens to fall behind Scholz’s SPD.

Habeck, who started off with high popularity as vice chancellor, subsequently claimed the Greens’ 2025 candidature for himself. But he has since lost ground over unpopular energy and climate change measures, spurring Baerbock’s hopes that she might get another shot. In Germany’s ranking of its most-popular politicians, Baerbock is now ahead of Habeck and neck-in-neck with Scholz. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius takes the No. 1 slot.

Although Baerbock and Habeck act professionally in their daily dealings with each other, their relationship is now tense as they have become determined rivals, according to two party officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak freely about interpersonal dynamics in the party.

“[The chancellor candidature] will be decided by how they stand in about a year-and-a-half, after the European elections,” said Green lawmaker Tobias Bacherle. “Both currently have very strong support in the party. The question will therefore be: Who has the better results to show? Who delivers better?”

One challenge for Baerbock is that even though her tough foreign policy approach has been good at generating headlines, German voters are currently — after months of debate over Ukraine, Russia and tanks — more concerned with domestic issues such as costly government plans to replace oil and gas in home heating with heat pumps. In the 2021 campaign, voters didn’t take much notice when Baerbock was the only candidate who correctly foresaw the dangers emanating from Russia’s aggressive foreign policy.

Another challenge is that the Greens are currently far from a realistic chance of leading the country, as their support has fallen from 23 percent last summer to only 16 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.

And then there are her recurring slips.

Baerbock caused a diplomatic incident in January when she said during a session of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe: “We’re fighting a war against Russia” — although Baerbock was quick to walk that back.

Jürgen Hardt, the center-right CDU’s foreign policy spokesperson, described it as “natural” that Baerbock‘s clearer communication style was more prone to mistakes than “the cautious, restrained phrases of the chancellor.”

“Nevertheless, this should not happen” to a politician striving for the highest office, Hardt said. “Such blunders could still become a problem for her in the next election campaign.”