Slovenia has been elected a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2024-2025, reaching the required backing from two-thirds of the UN member states in the first round of voting on Tuesday and beating Belarus in the Eastern European group.

Slovenia will be a member from 1 January 2024 until the end of 2025 and will preside over the Security Council in September 2024, in time for the regular session of the UN General Assembly.

“Today is a great day for Slovenia,” Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon said.

Prime Minister Robert Golob described the vote as “one of Slovenia’s greatest successes in international diplomacy.”

The vote comes after over a year of campaigning over two successive governments, as part of which Slovenian officials held talks with representatives of almost 190 countries.

The country launched its bid under the right-wing government of former prime minister Janez Janša in late 2021 at the urging of Western allies when the only candidate from the Eastern European group had even closer ties to Russia.

Slovenia had been reserved about predicting the outcome of the vote, with officials repeatedly saying they were moderately optimistic given that analysts had been warning it was uncertain how African and Asian countries would vote given that many do not share the West’s outlook on the war in Ukraine.

This is why the campaign eschewed Ukraine as a talking point almost entirely, focusing instead on Slovenia’s long-standing foreign policy priorities such as climate change, gender equality, and development aid.

In the end, Slovenia got 153 votes and Belarus only 38.

Slovenia was a member of the UN Security Council once before, in 1998-1999, when it was elected in the first round despite having two competitors in Macedonia and Belarus. In 2011, they made another attempt but were defeated by Azerbaijan after over a dozen rounds of voting.

(Sebastijan R. Maček | sta.si)

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