Who’s rising and who’s falling in the race to replace Guterres at the UN

António Guterres’s second term as UN Secretary-General ends on 31 December; he has decided not to stand for re-election. Apart from the fact that he is now 77 years old, the decade he has spent at the helm of the UN Headquarters has been decidedly gruelling, and in his most recent interviews he has clearly shown signs of fatigue. Guterres was the fifth European to hold the post, following the British Gladwyn Jebb, the Norwegian Trygve Lie, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld and the Austrian Kurt Waldheim. Before him, there was an Asian: the South Korean Ban Ki-moon, who served two terms from 2007 to 2016. He was the second from that region after the Burmese U Thant, who served between 1961 and 1971. Under the principle of rotation between geographical regions, it should now be Africa’s turn, which was represented by the Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali between 1992 and 1996, and then by the Ghanaian Kofi Annan between 1997 and 2006. But even more so to the Americas, whose only Secretary-General was the Peruvian Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, between 1982 and 1991. However, there is also a growing demand to have a woman in the role for the first time. For this reason, on 23 July, at the first debate on the next Secretary-General, four of the six candidates were women from the Americas: Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Rebecca Grynspan, former Vice-President of Costa Rica and former Secretary-General of the Ibero-American Community; Maria Fernanda Espinosa, former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ecuador and former President of the UN General Assembly; and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, who served as Minister for Amerindian Affairs and Foreign Affairs in Guyana, and later as Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and Guyana’s representative at the UN Headquarters. There was also a man from the Americas: the Argentine Rafael Grossi, who, after serving as ambassador to Austria, is now the influential Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As he also holds Italian citizenship, Grossi is supported by our government. And an African man, Macky Sall, former Prime Minister and President of Senegal and of the African Union.

Grossi was the most forthright, stating that “the world is experiencing the highest number of armed conflicts in the last forty years” and that the organisation is “absent from the resolution of the most serious conflicts”. Grynspan referred to her experience in negotiating the Black Sea agreement. Bachelet emphasised that the Secretary-General must use all the tools at his disposal. Sall recounted how, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, he travelled to Moscow and Kyiv on behalf of the African Union to defend the interests of a continent of 1.5 billion people affected by the blockade of the port of Odessa and the fertiliser shortage. Rodrigues-Birkett said that “the Secretary-General cannot afford the luxury of not trying”. Espinosa focused on climate change.

On 30 July, in the first formal vote, the number of candidates rose to seven with the addition of Olara Otunnu, former Permanent Representative of Uganda to the UN and Minister for Foreign Affairs. In the straw poll – the informal vote through which Security Council members gauge support for candidates – each country may express a favourable opinion, an unfavourable opinion or no opinion at all. Surprisingly, Rebecca Grynspan took the lead with ten votes in favour, followed by Guyana’s Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett with nine and Rafael Grossi with seven. Further behind were Macky Sall and Michelle Bachelet, both on six, Maria Fernanda Espinosa on five and Otunnu on two. In the second vote, on 21 August, Rodrigues-Birkett took the lead with eight votes in favour, compared with seven for Grynspan and Grossi. Sall remained steady, whilst Otunnu gained support. Bachelet’s campaign, however, collapsed: following the change of government in Chile, from Gabriel Boric to José Antonio Kast, Santiago withdrew its support and her votes in favour dropped to two. The other two Latin American candidates, Espinosa and Ivonne Baki – who entered the race at the initiative of Tonga – failed to make an impact: Baki even received zero votes in favour. In the third round of voting, on 18 September, Costa Rica’s Grynspan regained the lead with nine votes in favour, ahead of Rodrigues-Birkett’s eight. Grossi’s tally fell to five, partly due to the diplomatic fallout from Javier Milei’s stance on the Falklands, which cost him British support. Otunnu drew level with him, whilst Sall also secured five votes in favour, but with nine against. Bachelet, now down to just one vote in favour, withdrew. Espinosa and Baki also remain in the running, but show no signs of gaining ground: the former secured three votes in favour, the latter none.

The fourth round of voting is scheduled for Saturday. Grynspan therefore goes into the vote in the lead, but his candidacy is by no means a foregone conclusion: to elect the Secretary-General, the consent of all five permanent members of the Security Council is required, and the subsequent ratification by the General Assembly is essentially a formality. Russia has already made it clear that it does not favour any of the candidates. If the five fail to reach an agreement, a new name – a so-called ‘dark horse’ – could therefore emerge. In 2016, six preliminary rounds of voting were required before Guterres was selected.