Two permanent members of the Security Council registered opposition to Rafael Grossi's candidacy in the most recent informal poll, placing a notable barrier in front of his pursuit of the United Nations secretary-general post.
After a sixth informal vote among Security Council members laid out where the P5 nations stand in relation to one another, the 65-year-old diplomat's candidacy for the UN secretary-general post remains in play, though an unresolved split within the council's permanent membership continues to cloud the path forward. In the most recent round of voting, Grossi — who leads the IAEA — drew eight votes in support and six opposed, though two of the body's permanent members indicated they would not back his candidacy.
Grynspan, representing Costa Rica, and Rodrigues-Birkett, who previously served as Guyana's foreign minister, were likewise identified among the front-runners, yet each encountered the same structural barrier: veto-wielding permanent members stood in the way of their appointments moving forward. Nine votes were cast in favour of Grynspan, with Rodrigues-Birkett and Grossi each drawing support from eight members of the body. Objections from permanent members, however, fell on each of the three contenders, leaving the field without any name that all parties were prepared to back.
No candidate has yet won approval from all five permanent Security Council members — Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States — and the gap between diplomatic competition among those powers and the qualifications of the individual nominees has continued to widen with each round of voting.
That vote on Friday represented a departure from past practice, with the tally drawn up in a way that separated the ballots cast by permanent members from those submitted by the 10 elected seats on the council. Coloured ballots were distributed exclusively to the five permanent members, whereas elected member states retained white ones — an arrangement that allowed observers to track how many dissenting votes had originated from veto-holding nations.
To win endorsement from the Security Council, a nominee is required to secure votes from at least nine of the body's fifteen members while drawing no objection from any of its five permanent powers. Popular support among voters, however broad, offers no guarantee of a candidacy's viability when a single well-positioned opponent retains the authority to block it. Candidates who have been eliminated from one round are still permitted to put their names forward when the next round opens.
Adopted by the Security Council in the early 1980s, the non-binding polling procedure was designed to give member states a way to move past deadlocked votes when competing candidates drew roughly equal support.
Four individuals whose candidacies have been formally verified round out the field: Ivonne A-Baki and Maria Fernanda Espinosa from Ecuador, alongside Macky Sall from Senegal and Olara Otunnu from Uganda.
Backing for Grossi's candidacy has come from Argentina, with the Trump administration also understood to have offered its support for the position. When the other four permanent members align against a proposal, the vote of a single ally — regardless of that member's standing — cannot deliver a favourable result on its own. The long-running sovereignty dispute over the Falkland Islands — a British-administered territory that Argentina claims under the name Malvinas — gives London's position a notable bearing on any wider diplomatic process.
Both China and Russia have voiced support for a female candidate to fill the secretary-general role being vacated by António Guterres, a position the BRICS grouping has similarly pointed to when drawing attention to the underrepresentation of women and the limited number of leaders drawn from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa throughout the organisation's history. Polling figures have placed Grynspan — who previously served as Costa Rica's vice-president and led the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development — in a position of notable support. Rodrigues-Birkett has positioned herself as one of the candidates with a realistic path to the nomination.
Guterres is scheduled to leave the post at the close of 2026, when his second five-year mandate expires and a successor takes over. Rotation norms point toward Latin America holding a geographic advantage in the contest for the post, yet that informal convention alone has not broken the impasse that has taken hold among the parties involved.
How the most recent round of voting actually divided among the five permanent members remains unclear, given that the tally figures come from anonymous sources rather than an official release. Disputes over geopolitics, regional representation, and the institutional history of the United Nations have drawn the broader contest into a web of overlapping disagreements.
Speculation about potential new entrants to the race is now expected to intensify, and chatter about additional candidates potentially joining the contest has been building. On Friday, Waltz chose not to address media reports that Washington had objected to all seven candidates currently in contention, telling reporters that the priority had always been finding the most qualified person for the role; when asked whether new names might enter the running, he noted that any country was free to put forward additional nominees.
Among the names being passed around in diplomatic circles are Nickolay Mladenov, who holds the post of high representative for Gaza on the Board of Peace established under US President Donald Trump, and Lana Nusseibeh, who serves as the United Arab Emirates' minister of state for foreign affairs. Sinirlioglu, who holds the secretary-general post at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, has also come up in discussions as a potential candidate.
