The Race for the Next U.N. Chief Kicks Off
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The contest to succeed United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres rolls out beneath the glare of the spotlight at the organization’s headquarters this week, as candidates answer questions about their credentials for the job before member states and civil society groups.
A jaunty social media video posted in recent days portrays these so-called interactive dialogues on April 21 and April 22 as a lodestar of transparency and good governance. Four contenders, all officially nominated by at least one member state, will be grilled for three hours each in livestreamed events. In the introductory video, U.N. General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock describes the process as “potentially the world’s hardest job interview,” promising that “it will be entertaining.”
The contest to succeed United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres rolls out beneath the glare of the spotlight at the organization’s headquarters this week, as candidates answer questions about their credentials for the job before member states and civil society groups.
A jaunty social media video posted in recent days portrays these so-called interactive dialogues on April 21 and April 22 as a lodestar of transparency and good governance. Four contenders, all officially nominated by at least one member state, will be grilled for three hours each in livestreamed events. In the introductory video, U.N. General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock describes the process as “potentially the world’s hardest job interview,” promising that “it will be entertaining.”
Many member states sent their chief U.N. ambassadors to the dialogues, and the candidates fielded questions from a full house in a chamber that seats around 700 people. Topics ranged from technical issues to grand themes such as impartiality and multilingualism.
But will these dialogues actually help determine who takes the helm of the U.N. as its 10th secretary-general next January? The tradition began in 2016 with high hopes: At the conclusion of the first dialogues that year, then-General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft told reporters, “We have established a new standard of transparency and inclusivity for the appointment process, but it has the potential also to influence the final outcome of the selection of the Secretary-General.”
Among those seeking to become secretary-general, three candidates have been on the hustings for months. Rafael Grossi, the Argentine diplomat who has led the International Atomic Energy Agency for six years and has the biggest profile beyond the U.N. system, is widely considered the front-runner.
Grossi’s dialogue took place on Tuesday. In a notable moment, he used French to answer a question posed by the European Union in English, in a likely a nod to France’s veto power. Before the dialogues, a diplomat said that France expects secretary-general candidates to speak French when they visit Paris on their campaign rounds of the world’s major capitals.
Still, more contenders could jump in the race. One diplomat observed that some could be “biding their time to avoid so much scrutiny.” The most optimistic voices think that these other announcements will come in May or June, with their own interactive dialogues. The pessimists suggest that a dark horse handpicked by the great powers will emerge shortly before the informal deadline to select the next secretary-general in October.
Another diplomat familiar with the inner workings of the process said they expected “an ‘October surprise,’ but in September.” (Several officials spoke privately with Foreign Policy, under normal diplomatic rules, at the U.N. headquarters in New York City on April 17.)
The U.N. Charter is scant on details about the selection process, stipulating only that the secretary-general shall be appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. That effectively hands the Security Council a monopoly over the final decision as long as it names a single candidate.
The United States will undoubtedly have a big say in the final selection, but not a free hand. Any contender first needs to survive the Security Council’s secret straw polls, expected to begin in July, with the support of at least nine members, including all five veto-wielding permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
There is a precedent for a successful sleeper candidate: In 1981, a veto duel within the Security Council over two candidates persisted for 16 rounds, paralyzing the secretary-general race. Eventually, the council members asked both candidates to withdraw and tapped Peruvian diplomat Javier Pérez de Cuéllar as secretary-general. However, that was decades before the 2015 reforms that, among other things, required candidates to be officially nominated by a member state.
The later rounds of polling within the Security Council use color-coded ballots to indicate a permanent member’s vote. The ballots include three categories for each candidate: “encourage,” “discourage,” and “no opinion.” Guterres, widely seen as the leading candidate in 2016, went through six straw-poll rounds beginning in July and won the council’s nomination on Oct. 5.
Though the straw poll results are supposed to be secret, the fact that the poll takes place is not. Council members emerge to announce whether they have made a final decision in a process that is often compared to the papal conclave. (The results of the poll are often leaked shortly thereafter.)
If the Security Council makes an unpopular selection, then the General Assembly could take the unprecedented step of rejecting the candidate in a secret ballot of the 193 member states. One obstacle to such an outcome is the divergent interests of the five permanent members, who aren’t likely to coalesce around an unorthodox candidate after debating the contenders at length.
It’s easy to imagine the topic coming up, for example, when U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing next month. And the Trump administration could try to leverage the financial hardship that it has inflicted on the U.N. in negotiations with Security Council members. In Trump’s second term, the United States has stopped virtually all payments to the United Nations.
Washington is nearly $2 billion in arrears for the regular budget, which funds administrative costs—including $767 million for the current year, which was due in February. Combined with missing U.S. payments toward the peacekeeping budget, the total owed is around $4 billion.
“Our budget officials said in March that the U.S. accounted for about 95 percent of U.N. arrears,” Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for the U.N. secretary-general, confirmed in an email to Foreign Policy in mid-April.
In February, Washington made a $160 million payment earmarked for the regular budget. At the time, Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., put an “America First” spin on this move for Trump’s base. In an interview with Fox News, Waltz said, “There are times where the U.N. has been incredibly helpful to U.S. foreign policy and objectives, but there are also times where it’s working against us … It has become bloated. It has become duplicative.”
Though there is no directive that explicitly prevents a permanent member from nominating one of its own citizens, it is one of the most ironclad unwritten rules of the process. That is worth noting, given Trump’s track record of appointing close associates—and even himself—to other important positions. In practice, the Security Council straw polls have tended to favor a secretary-general from a middle-power that is widely perceived as neutral.
Domestic politics are another challenge for the contenders. Two of the four candidates in this week’s dialogues are not backed by their own countries, which has raised eyebrows. Michelle Bachelet, who was the first to take the stage on April 21, served twice as the president of Chile—the only woman to hold the office. But when a new conservative government took power in Santiago last month, it withdrew the country’s nomination for Bachelet, who is a member of the Socialist Party of Chile. She retains the support of Brazil and Mexico.
Meanwhile, former Senegalese President Macky Sall, a late entrant to the race and the only African candidate, was nominated by Burundi. A fractious power transition in 2024 makes it unlikely that he would ever receive support from his country’s current government; the president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, was held in pretrial detention for a social media post until 10 days before the election that brought him to power.
Three of the candidates presenting themselves this week are from Latin America, including Bachelet, Grossi, and former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan, an economist and the chief of the U.N. Trade and Development organization. She took a leave of absence from her role at the start of April to focus on her campaign.
There is a widespread feeling among U.N. diplomats that the next secretary-general should come from Latin America and the Caribbean, one of five regional groups at the U.N. (This regional rotation is another unwritten rule, along with the expectation that the secretary-general will serve two consecutive five-year terms.) Four secretary-generals have been from the organization’s Western European and Other States grouping, while the Africa and Asia-Pacific groups have each produced two. Only one Latin American candidate, Pérez de Cuéllar, has ultimately taken the helm of the United Nations.
Some Eastern European capitals are pushing for a secretary-general from their region, which would be a first—something that they called for more than a decade ago. However, they have not put forward a candidate thus far. Then, as now, there is no Eastern European country that wouldn’t face a likely veto by either Russia or the United States.
In September, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution “noting with regret that no woman has ever held the position of Secretary-General,” adding that it “encourages Member States to strongly consider nominating women as candidates.” This was a common refrain before the selection of Guterres a decade ago—yet he remained the front-runner throughout the 2016 selection process.
It might be too soon to say whether the dialogues will play a supportive role this year. The tradition is still relatively new in the U.N.’s 80-year history. Some diplomats want more substantial reforms—such as publication of the color-coded straw poll results or the presentation of more than one candidate by the Security Council so the General Assembly has more than an up-or-down vote. For now, that’s not on the table.
However, the interactive dialogues do give the 178 member states that are not on the Security Council the chance to make their preferences known before polling begins, which could avert the historic failure of a candidate in the fall. It’s not quite like the old days, when the small field of potential secretary-general candidates was winnowed down to one contender in the backrooms of the Security Council. But perhaps it’s not so different, either.
J. Alex Tarquinio is a resident correspondent at the United Nations in New York and the host of The Delegates Lounge podcast. She is a German Marshall Fund journalism fellowship recipient and a past national president of the Society of Professional Journalists. X: @alextarquinio
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