Angst. Confusion. Endless conjecture. Such has been the mood at the United Nations in recent weeks as world powers have deliberated behind closed doors over who will be the next secretary general.
For 80 years, the job has gone to the classic gray man: a diplomat from democracies including Sweden, South Korea and, most recently, Portugal.
Times have changed.
The latest contest has pitted two candidates backed by regional rivals — Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — along with a diplomat supported by Argentina’s right-wing leader, Javier Milei, as well as four other diplomats from Latin America.
Other entrants could still join the race. Hungary’s former strongman leader, Viktor Orban, was even floated as a contender in a Wall Street Journal editorial. And it is possible that the current secretary general, António Guterres, 77, who leaves at the end of the year after two terms, could step down without a successor being chosen.
In the world body’s 80-year history, that has never happened.
Considering how battered the United Nations has been by crises — wars in Ukraine and Gaza, climate change, and the alarming growth of artificial intelligence — it is remarkable that anyone would want the top job, and that there is such turmoil over it.
President Trump has repeatedly attacked the organization, pulled out of numerous U.N. agreements and gutted the organization’s funding. Still, in theory at least, it’s the secretary general who sets the U.N.’s agenda and goads world powers to work together to advance world peace.
This year’s race for the position was jolted by two last-minute entrants.
Lana Nusseibeh, the powerful former U.N. envoy from the United Arab Emirates, entered the contest in October, prompting an outcry over reports that her country has supported rebels accused of atrocities in Sudan. Then, the Emirates’ regional rival, Turkey, nominated its own candidate: Feridun Sinirlioglu, the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a United Nations body.
The turmoil has cracked open the field, upending hopes that a Latin American official would get the job, in keeping with an informal agreement of regional rotation in the role, or that a woman would finally take the reins (all nine secretaries general have been men).
“This is uncharted territory,” Daniel Safran-Hon, a former United Nations staff member who is now a nonresident fellow at the International Peace Institute, a research organization in New York. “There has simply never been such a chaotic race for U.N. secretary general.”
There has also never been a more chaotic time at the global body.
The U.N.’s overall budget is $6.5 billion in arrears, driven largely by the Trump administration’s funding cuts. Its reputation has been hammered by its inability to negotiate peace in any of the world’s war zones, including Sudan, Syria and Gaza. Morale among U.N. staff is at rock bottom, according to several current and former staff members. Thousands of jobs have been eliminated.
The U.N. Security Council is responsible for choosing the next secretary general. But relations among its member countries, especially its five permanent members with veto powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — range from distrustful to rotten.
Complicating matters, Mr. Trump’s view is unclear. His priorities are shaped by competing foreign policy advisers who are now focused on the war with Iran. His ambassador to the United Nations, Michael Waltz, took the role only after resigning as national security adviser, following reports that he had shared sensitive military information with a journalist.
Some candidates for secretary general, including Rafael Grossi, are seen as being close to the United States. Mr. Grossi, an Argentine, leads the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and his supporters in Washington are known in some U.N. circles as the “Grossi bros.”
Others, like Rebeca Grynspan, a Costa Rican diplomat who heads the U.N.’s trade body and helped negotiate a short-lived Black Sea grain trade deal, are viewed as being too unwilling to shake up the agency enough to please the Trump administration.
Ms. Nusseibeh is also seen as being cozy with Washington and Moscow, but, ultimately, too close to the authoritarian government of the United Arab Emirates.
And China has made it clear that it favors a Latin American secretary general, though it hasn’t said who.
“It shows how deeply divided the members of the Security Council are,” said Robert A. Wood, a former American diplomat at the U.S. mission to the United Nations. “You see that on major foreign policy issues the Council deals with. Now you see it in the secretary general’s race.”
(The last major succession crisis came in 1961. After the death of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in a plane crash, the organization was run by an acting secretary general. But that was not before Moscow proposed a troika representing the Soviet Union, the West and the nonaligned countries.)
The Security Council is trying to select the next U.N. boss through a series of “straw polls,” or informal ballots. No one knows who voted which way but hints of the deliberations have emerged.
The eighth and latest poll was carried out on Thursday afternoon, and Ms. Nusseibeh did not fare well: According to Security Council Report, an independent publication, six of the Council’s 15 members voted against her candidacy. Mr. Sinirlioglu did worse. Neither pulled out. Ms. Grynspan emerged on top, with 12 of the Council’s members supporting her candidacy and three saying they did not.
But which three? And did they include any of the five permanent members? What kind of horse-trading would be required? Would the American midterm elections affect the U.S. position?
All remained unclear, which has led only to more speculation and more anxiety.
“There’s a general sense that at a moment when the United Nations is in dire need of very strong leadership,” Richard Gowan, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, said, “it may not get the leadership it needs.”
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