United Nations: The election for the next secretary-general is deadlocked, with the top three candidates getting two negative votes each from permanent members and only 76 days left for a new leader to succeed Antonio Guterres.
In the straw poll held on Friday (local time), UNCTAD head Rebecca Grynspan, with nine overall positive votes, was slightly ahead of former Guyana Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birket and International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi, all of whom got two negative votes from permanent members.
This was the sixth round of anonymous, informal voting in the Council to assess the sentiments towards the seven candidates, and the first to use colour-coded votes to tell permanent members apart.
The results are supposed to be secret, but they were leaked to PassBlue and 1for8Billion, which cover the UN in-depth.
With the top three candidates now known to be opposed by two permanent members each, serious negotiations could start among the veto-wielders, and between the candidates and permanent members.
Yet another possibility is for new candidates to spring up.
The candidate who wins ten votes without a veto from a permanent member will be recommended to the General Assembly, which routinely rubber stamps the Council recommendation, usually made unanimously in the final stage.
In the straw polls, members vote “encourage”, interpreted as positive, “discourage”, a negative, and “no opinion” or neutral and in the previous five there were no distinctions between the votes of the permanent members and elected members without veto powers.
Grynspan, who is from Costa Rica, received a total of five negatives and one neutral.
She led in five of the six polls, except the second one in August, when Rodrigues-Birket led the field.
This time Rodrigues-Birket received eight positives, six negatives and one neutral, the same as Grossi.
But he got only two positives from permanent members, while she got three.
Olara Otunnu, a former UN under-secretary-general and Uganda’s foreign minister, former Senegal President Macky Sall, and Maria Fernanda Espinosa, a former president of the General Assembly and Ecuador’s foreign minister, got three negatives each from permanent members, and Ivonne A-Baki, a former Ecuadorian ambassador to the US, got five negatives.
The international sentiment is strong for electing a woman to head the 80-year-old UN that has had nine men as secretaries-general.
Latin America and the Caribbean have staked a claim because it has been 35 years since anyone from the continent has held the office after Javier Perez de Cuellar ended his term in 1991.
Two who have been rumoured as last-minute entrants to the race if the deadlock continues are Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates minister of state for foreign affairs, and Feridun Hadi Sinirlioglu, the secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, who is from Turkey.
The US under President Donald Trump may hold the key to who gets the nod by tenaciously holding on to its veto.
According to reports, the US does not think any of the seven meet its bar, and Trump is said to want someone who will carry out a drastic reform of the UN.
Headed by the World Cup Soccer and the award of FIFA’s inaugural Peace Prize, he was reported in July to have floated the name of the international football association’s head, Gianni Infantino.
But the candidature of the controversial Swiss national was not taken seriously.