The United Nations Security Council will meet behind closed doors on Thursday for the first of a series of ballots in a months-long process to choose the next secretary general. For opaqueness and guile, it puts the Vatican conclave in the shade.
A murky process at the UN
When the permanent representatives, or ambassadors, of the 15 members of the UN Security Council meet in New York on Thursday, they will receive seven white ballot papers, each with the name of one of the candidates to succeed António Guterres as secretary general. Using identical pens provided by the council presidency, they will tick one of three boxes on each ballot paper: Encourage/Discourage/No Opinion Expressed before folding it three times and casting it.
Voting takes 10 minutes and the level of trust in the room is such that after every round, the council president will hold up each ballot cast and show it to everyone present as he announces it. No secretariat staff will be present and the ballot papers are shredded at the end of the voting, after which the UN General Assembly and the media will be informed that a straw poll has taken place but will not receive any further details.
The UN charter says the secretary general, who is the chief administrative officer and the most senior diplomat in the UN, is elected by the general assembly, where all member states are represented, on a recommendation from the UN Security Council. In practice, the security council chooses a candidate during a series of straw polls that will continue from this week until September or October before submitting the name to the general assembly for a rubber stamp.
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Six candidates took part in a televised town hall meeting last week, facing polite questions from diplomats, UN staff and civil society representatives. Under an informal rotation system, it is Latin America’s turn to provide the secretary general and most of the candidates are from that region.
Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the smoothest performer during last week’s town hall, is often spoken of as the favourite. But the UN has never appointed a woman to the top job and most of the other candidates are women, including former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, former Costa Rican vice-president Rebeca Grynspan and former Ecuadorean foreign minister María Fernanda Espinosa.
The rotation system is unreliable as well as informal and it was supposed to be the turn of eastern Europe when Guterres, who is Portuguese, won in 2016. Last week saw the late arrival into the contest of 75-year-old Ugandan diplomat Olara Otunnu, a UN insider who has been around so long he invented the system of straw polls to choose the secretary general when he was president of the security council in 1981.
The security council has five permanent members (the US, China, Russia, France and Britain), known as the P5, and 10 elected members, who are each serving a two-year term. Any of the P5 can veto a candidate and in the final straw polls, they will use red ballot papers while the other 10 continue to use white ones.
The winning candidate will need to win at least nine “encourage” votes with no veto from any of the P5 member states. This means that even if the P5 agree on a candidate, seven of the 10 elected member states could gang up to block the appointment.
As the straw polls enter their final stage in the autumn, candidates are likely to come under pressure from security council members, particularly the P5, to make commitments in return for their support. These typically include giving important UN positions to the country’s nationals and a new report by the advocacy group 1 for 8 Billion claims that most recent secretaries general, including Guterres, have been subject to such pressure.
“The need for a secretary general candidate to satisfy P5 expectations of top jobs can become a headache for UN reform plans, as proposals need to preserve accommodations made to powerful states. More broadly, P5 states use the selection process to safeguard their status within the UN system, seeking assurances from secretary general candidates that they will not shake up the system in a way that could negatively affect their position,” the report says.
“The most dangerous moment for such promises is during the straw poll process and in particular towards the end of it when permanent members of the UN Security Council are given their coloured ballot papers. Getting a red ballot paper ‘discourage’ vote from a permanent member of the security council is a signal that they are likely to be vetoed, and is frequently fatal to a candidate’s chances, placing significant pressure upon them to make accommodations with the permanent member they suspect may have cast it.”
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