During the nearly four years I was posted at the Indian Embassy in Berlin, I developed a real fondness for Germany — its seriousness of purpose, its institutional honesty, its willingness to confront a difficult history in ways that most countries simply don’t. India and Germany have more in common than is often acknowledged: a belief in multilateralism, a preference for rules over raw power, and a shared interest in a world order that isn’t simply dictated by the strongest. I left Berlin genuinely hoping the relationship between our two countries would deepen, built on those shared foundations.
Which is exactly why I find the current moment so frustrating. Because the Germany I am writing about today — the one that just lost a UN Security Council seat for the first time since 1973 — is not living up to what it could be, or what it tells the world it stands for. And the gap between the two is doing real damage to how Germany is perceived in India and across the Global South, damage that affects the very partnership I’d like to see flourish.
Let’s talk about what actually happened.
The Bare Facts
For the first time since it started bidding for UNSC seats in 1973, Germany lost. It got 104 votes in the General Assembly, well short of the 127 needed for a two-thirds majority. Portugal walked away with 134. Austria got 131. And it wasn’t a close run — Germany finished a distant third out of three candidates competing for two seats.
For a country that has never lost this vote before, and that routinely talks about deserving a permanent Security Council seat, the symbolism was brutal. Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul called it “a bitter defeat.” That’s fair. What came after — the explanations — is where it gets interesting.
The Official Story
Berlin offered three reasons, and none of them are wrong exactly. They’re just incomplete in a way that is very revealing.
Russia lobbied against us. Wadephul pointed to Moscow’s opposition to Germany’s “rock-solid support for Ukraine.” Probably true. Russia does play these games. But Portugal and Austria are also supporters of Ukraine, and they won. So Russia’s lobbying — even if real — doesn’t explain the 30-vote gap.
Our support for Israel cost us votes. This is the most credible part of the official story. Germany’s alignment with Israel during Gaza — resisting arms embargoes, cautious language when international courts started looking at potential war crimes — caused deep damage in the Arab world and beyond. Polls showed only nine percent of people in Arab countries hold a positive view of Germany. When images of German weapons being used in Gaza circulate on social media from Cairo to Karachi, that kind of goodwill doesn’t come back quickly.
We entered the race too late. Austria and Portugal had been campaigning for over a decade. Germany showed up with a flurry of last-minute lobbying — Wadephul reportedly met around 80 ministers and ambassadors in the week before the vote. It didn’t work. You can’t build trust in seven days.
All of this contributed. None of it is the whole story. The full story is more uncomfortable, because it requires Germany to look inward rather than point at Russia.
Why Portugal and Austria Actually Won
This part rarely gets discussed, but it matters. Germany didn’t just lose — it lost to specific alternatives that many countries actively preferred, for their own reasons.
Portugal came into the race with deep ties across Lusophone Africa and Latin America, a reputation for quieter diplomacy, and the symbolic weight of the UN Secretary-General — António Guterres — being Portuguese. Lisbon has cultivated a reputation as a bridge-builder, not a schoolmaster. It listens more than it lectures.
Austria offered something different: neutrality. As a non-NATO country, Vienna presented itself as a less confrontational Western option — somewhere between the Western bloc and the rest of the world. For states that didn’t want NATO dynamics imported directly into the Security Council, Austria looked like a sensible middle ground.
Against these two, Germany often comes across as the big Western power that arrives with moral vocabulary and not much else. Faced with three Western candidates, many governments simply saw no reason to reward the one that already dominates European decision-making and whose tone they find, to put it gently, a bit much.
The Deeper Problem: Hierarchical Morality
The most honest explanation for what happened sits at the intersection of arrogance, hypocrisy, and a particular kind of selective morality that the Global South has learned to recognize — and has now formally registered its irritation with.
The pattern is fairly consistent. States like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, or smaller non-aligned regimes are treated as pure violators, their actions condemned firmly and immediately. The United States, Israel, and certain European allies get a different category: “tragic exceptions” whose violations are regrettable, understandable, complicated. Germany’s language shifts registers depending on who’s in the dock.
From the perspective of a diplomat in Nairobi, Dhaka, or Bogotá, this looks like what it is: principles applied to enemies and suspended for friends. The message many non-Western capitals have received over the years is straightforward: international law is universal when it constrains you; flexible when it constrains our allies.
A country that operates that way should not be surprised when states use a secret UN ballot — at no cost to themselves — to quietly register how they feel about it.
Venezuela — When Silence Is Its Own Statement
There’s a specific case that illustrates this more cleanly than almost anything else. When the United States, in January 2026, essentially abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — a legally elected head of state, whatever you might think of his government — Germany said nothing. Analysts at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs explicitly noted this: Berlin has taken no public position on the US action in Venezuela.
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Now, imagine if Russia had done something equivalent to the leader of a neighbouring country. The response from German politicians would have been immediate, forceful, and carried live on every news channel. The silence on Venezuela isn’t an oversight. It’s a policy choice. And it is noticed.
The Iran Moment — Schrödinger’s International Law
This is where Germany’s contradiction became impossible to ignore. When US and Israeli forces launched military strikes on Iran without UN authorization — the kind of unilateral action Germany would normally be among the first to condemn — Chancellor Friedrich Merz did something quite extraordinary. He defended it.
In his first public remarks after the strikes, Merz said that “international law classifications bring relatively little” when discussing Iran, and that now was “not the moment to lecture partners and allies.” The German left-wing newspaper Taz coined a phrase that deserves to be remembered: Schrödinger’s international law — simultaneously applicable and non-applicable, depending on who’s doing the violating.
The contrast is almost cinematic. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, Merz stood at the podium and said, with evident conviction, “We Germans know that a world in which only power counts would be a dark place.” Weeks later, when his allies bombed a country without UN approval, international law “brings relatively little.” Outside the Western bubble, this isn’t pragmatism or realpolitik. It’s the very definition of double standards.
The left-wing framing didn’t come from nowhere, either. When Chancellor Merz visited Beijing in February 2026, he publicly praised €250 billion in bilateral trade ties, signed new deals, and said carefully scripted things about China’s influence over Russia. There were no public mentions of human rights.
But mention Russia or Iran, and the finger goes up immediately. The inconsistency isn’t random — it tracks economic interest and alliance politics, dressed up in the language of values.
The Long Shadow of Sixteen Years
Context matters here. Germany isn’t in this position because of Chancellor Merz alone. Claus Strunz, Euronews’ editorial director, put it bluntly: after sixteen years of Angela Merkel’s policy mistakes in energy, the economy, and migration, followed by three disastrous years of a dysfunctional Scholz coalition, Germany has arrived at a historic low point. It has become, in Strunz’s memorable phrase, “an old-people’s home and a museum for a world that no longer exists” — when it should be the engine driving Europe’s future.
That domestic decline has a direct foreign policy dimension. A state that is losing economic dynamism and technological edge, yet continues to lecture others on democracy and fiscal virtue, becomes a caricature. The gap between Germany’s self-image — Europe’s responsible adult, champion of multilateralism — and how others increasingly see it, has been widening for years.
Does It Actually Matter?
Honestly? Less than it should, in practical terms.
A non-permanent Security Council seat is largely symbolic. The Council has been paralyzed for years — the US, China, and Russia blocking each other on virtually every significant resolution. It didn’t prevent the war in Ukraine. It hasn’t resolved Gaza. Germany’s seat would have been largely decorative.
Germany remains the second-largest financial contributor to the UN. It still has enormous economic and diplomatic weight. Losing this vote doesn’t change any of that.
What it does do is punch a hole in Germany’s longer-term ambition. Berlin has been making noises for years about deserving a permanent UNSC seat. The logic of that argument is now considerably harder to make: if you cannot convince the General Assembly to give you a two-year term, why would anyone trust you with a permanent one? The defeat reveals something that GDP figures tend to obscure — that Germany’s ability to translate money and size into actual trust and influence has been eroding, quietly, for some time.
Will Germany Actually Change?
I doubt it. Not fundamentally.
There will be reviews. Parliamentary debates. Calls for “thorough analysis.” The Greens will blame Merz. The SPD will blame Gaza policy. Everyone will blame Russia. What is very unlikely to happen is the harder conversation — the one where Germany acknowledges that the problem isn’t its policies in isolation, but the pattern underneath them.
Strunz, in his Euronews piece, argues that Germany needs power to exercise values — economic strength, defence capability, technological sovereignty. That’s part of the answer. But power without credibility is just another form of pressure. The countries that voted against Germany aren’t doing so because they think Germany is too weak. They’re doing so because they think Germany is selective, self-righteous, and doesn’t really listen.
Fixing that doesn’t require a speech. It requires a different posture — one where Germany applies its own standards to its own allies, engages the Global South as equals rather than pupils, and stops treating every diplomatic interaction as an opportunity to establish its moral authority. None of that is easy. Some of it is costly in the short term, particularly in the transatlantic relationship. But it’s the price of a foreign policy that actually matches the rhetoric.
From Where I’m Standing
Those four years in Berlin gave me something specific: an understanding of how Germany sees itself, and a clearer view of the gap between that self-image and how it lands in a country like India.
In India, Germany’s reputation was built on engineering precision, on the post-war transformation, on a genuine reckoning with history that earned real respect. Germany, in the Indian imagination, was the serious European partner — not Britain with its colonial nostalgia, not France forever seeking grandeur. Just solid, reliable, honest Germany.
That image has taken real hits. The Gaza positions. The Venezuela silence. The Iran response. The sense — especially among younger, internationally-minded Indians — that Germany talks about international law when it’s convenient and sets it aside when it isn’t. Reputation, once lost, is rebuilt only over decades. And you can’t start rebuilding it until you admit why it was lost in the first place.
If Germany continues to attribute this defeat to Russian lobbying and external forces rather than its own choices, the Security Council seat will be the first of several things it finds itself losing.
The Euronews piece that partly prompted this ends on a question about which path Germany takes: the one back to health, or the one toward irrelevance. It’s applied there to Germany’s domestic and economic future, but it fits the diplomatic situation just as well.
Germany still has everything it needs to be the kind of partner the Global South actually wants — serious, generous, consistent, willing to apply its own standards to itself as much as to others. The resources are there. The history, painful as it is, could be an asset if approached with genuine humility rather than as a credential.
Whether June 3, 2026 turns out to be a wake-up call or just another thing that gets explained away — that, I suspect, will depend on whether anyone in Berlin is actually willing to ask the uncomfortable question. Not “why did we lose?” but “what kind of country have we become, and is that the country we want to be?”
I genuinely hope they ask it.
If you found this useful, share it around. And if you disagree — particularly if you’re German, or have a different read on the Global South’s motivations — I’d genuinely like to hear it.
