Portugal and Austria defeat Germany for seats on the UN Security Council

Por­tu­gal and Aus­tria de­feat­ed Ger­many for seats on the pow­er­ful but deeply di­vid­ed U.N. Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil on Wednes­day in a hot­ly con­test­ed race af­ter in­tense cam­paign­ing.

The 10 ro­tat­ing seats on the 15-mem­ber Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil are ear­marked for dif­fer­ent re­gions of the world. The as­sem­bly elects five coun­tries by se­cret bal­lot every year to serve two-year terms along­side the coun­cil’s five per­ma­nent ve­to-wield­ing mem­bers — the Unit­ed States, Rus­sia, Chi­na, Britain and France.

In the oth­er con­test­ed race, af­ter four rounds of vot­ing in the 193-mem­ber Gen­er­al As­sem­bly, Kyr­gyzs­tan de­feat­ed the Philip­pines by a vote of 143-49 and will join the coun­cil for the first time.

Zim­bab­we, the African can­di­date, and Caribbean can­di­date Trinidad and To­ba­go had no op­po­nents and both were elect­ed with more than 180 votes.

In the race for the two seats for the group of main­ly West­ern na­tions, Por­tu­gal re­ceived 134 votes and Aus­tria 131 votes, while Ger­many, Eu­rope’s eco­nom­ic pow­er­house which had served six pre­vi­ous terms on the coun­cil, re­ceived 104 votes.

Aus­tria’s for­eign min­istry said its elec­tion capped a 15-year cam­paign and is a “strong in­ter­na­tion­al sign of con­fi­dence” in the coun­try.

Kyr­gyzs­tan’s For­eign Min­is­ter Jeen­bek Ku­lubayev told re­porters “we un­der­stand now is a tur­bu­lent time” and said Kyr­gyzs­tan will work to­geth­er with oth­er coun­cil mem­bers.

The five new mem­bers will take up their seats on Jan. 1. They will re­place Den­mark, Greece, Pak­istan, Pana­ma and So­ma­lia.

The Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil is man­dat­ed un­der the U.N. Char­ter with en­sur­ing in­ter­na­tion­al peace and se­cu­ri­ty, but it has failed in the three ma­jor cur­rent con­flicts be­cause of the ve­to pow­er of Rus­sia on Ukraine and of the Unit­ed States, Is­rael’s clos­est al­ly, of­ten on Gaza and on Iran.

There have been decades of ef­forts to re­form the Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil to re­flect the geopo­lit­i­cal re­al­i­ties of the cur­rent world, not of the post-World War II era 80 years ago, when the Unit­ed Na­tions was es­tab­lished. But they have all failed, though a new at­tempt is un­der­way. —UNIT­ED NA­TIONS (AP)

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Sto­ry by EDITH M. LED­ER­ER | As­so­ci­at­ed Press

As­so­ci­at­ed Press writer Stephanie Liecht­en­stein in Vi­en­na, Aus­tria con­tributed to this re­port.