Three of the leading candidates for the next UN secretary-general post have each drawn two vetoes from permanent Security Council members, leaving the selection process without a clear frontrunner and a transition window of 76 days before António Guterres's tenure concludes.
Friday's non-binding ballot placed UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebecca Grynspan marginally ahead of the other two contenders — former Guyana Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birket and International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi — with Grynspan drawing nine favourable tallies overall while each of the three candidates collected two vetoes from permanent members of the body.
The round marked the sixth such non-binding, anonymised ballot held within the Council to gauge where member positions stood on the seven candidates. It also introduced colour-coded ballots for the first time as a way to distinguish the votes cast by permanent members from those of others.
Those findings, though kept restricted by design, were disclosed to PassBlue and 1for8Billion — two outlets that focus closely on UN affairs — by way of a disclosure that had not been authorised.
Diplomatic talks among the holders of veto power — both with one another and with the leading contenders — became a possibility once it emerged that each of the three front-runners faced opposition from a pair of permanent members. Prospective candidates retaining the option to join the race represent one path the situation has yet to foreclose.
Any nominee clearing ten votes in the Security Council without a blocking veto from a permanent member advances to the General Assembly, a body that historically endorses the Council's choice — typically put forward by consensus at that concluding stage.
During those straw-poll exercises, balloting options consist of three choices — one read as supportive, one as opposed, and one carrying no particular lean. Across the five rounds held beforehand, no procedural distinction separated the ballots cast by permanent members from those cast by elected members who hold no veto authority.
Of the six assessments Grynspan collected from permanent members, five came back negative and one landed as neutral. She topped the field in five of the six rounds conducted — the lone exception being the second poll in August, when Rodrigues-Birket held the advantage.
On this occasion, Rodrigues-Birket's tally broke down into eight favourable responses, six unfavourable ones, and a single neutral — a breakdown that matched Grossi's exactly. Of the permanent members, she collected three favourable votes against his two.
Three votes against from permanent members were recorded against each of Olara Otunnu — who previously served as UN under-secretary-general and as Uganda's foreign minister — former Senegalese President Macky Sall, and Maria Fernanda Espinosa, who had held both the presidency of the General Assembly and Ecuador's top diplomatic post, while Ivonne A-Baki, once Ecuador's ambassador in Washington, drew opposition from all five permanent members.
Calls from abroad for the UN's next secretary-general to be a woman have gathered momentum, with the organisation's top post having gone to men across all nine of its previous occupants in its eight decades of existence. The region spanning Latin America and the Caribbean has put forward a case rooted in the absence of a secretary-general from that part of the world for more than three decades — a gap stretching back to when Javier Perez de Cuellar vacated the post in 1991.
Names circulating as possible late additions to the contest — should the stalemate persist — include Lana Nusseibeh, who holds a minister of state portfolio covering foreign affairs within the United Arab Emirates government, and Feridun Hadi Sinirlioglu, a Turkish national currently serving as secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Because any nomination reaching the UN Security Council can be turned aside by a single veto, the administration retains a meaningful hand in determining which candidate ultimately fills the post. Unnamed sources indicate that none of the seven candidates currently meets the threshold set by Washington, with the incoming administration said to be seeking a nominee committed to overhauling how the UN operates.
Gianni Infantino's name had been put forward as a candidate, according to accounts from July. Reviewers assessing the field found little traction in what she put forward.
