The high-stakes race to lead the United Nations: Who will shape Global Diplomacy after 2026?

**When António Guterres took the helm of the United Nations in 2017, the organization was already wrestling with questions about its relevance in a world tilting toward nationalism and great-power rivalry. **

Nine years later, as he prepares to step down at the end of his second term, those questions have only sharpened – and the contest to replace him has become a referendum on whether the institution can still bend the arc of world events, or merely document its failures.

A diverse field of candidates is now coalescing, each carrying a different theory of what the United Nations should be: a moral voice, a technocratic problem-solver, a diplomatic broker, or a champion of the Global South. The outcome will not only decide who occupies the 38th-floor office overlooking the East River. It will reveal which vision of multilateralism, if any, still commands the confidence of a fractured international order.

The Candidates: A field unlike any before

Two names have already broken from the pack.

Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, enters the race with what amounts to the most recognizable résumé on the ballot. Nominated by Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, she offers a blend of executive experience – she ran a G20 economy – and moral authority forged in the crucible of human rights advocacy. For a world grappling with democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism, Bachelet represents the argument that the UN’s top job should belong to someone willing to name abuses, not merely manage them.

Then there is Ivonne Baki of Ecuador, a seasoned diplomat and former minister nominated by Tonga, whose career has been defined by cultural diplomacy and coalition-building across regions that rarely see themselves reflected in the UN’s senior leadership. Her nomination underscores a shift: the Global South is no longer content to watch the most powerful corners of the world anoint the institution’s leader.

Beyond the frontrunners, the field widens into a study in contrasts.

Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, nominated by Burundi and his own country, brings the weight of executive experience from the African continent; a region that has never held the Secretary-Generalship and has long argued it is overdue. Sall’s pitch is implicitly about representation: that an organization dominated by Western and Asian powers cannot credibly claim to speak for the world if Africa remains locked out of its top office.

Rafael Mariano Grossi of Argentina, the current Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, represents a different kind of candidacy; one rooted in technical expertise and the grimmest of global threats. At a time when nuclear rhetoric has crept back into great-power discourse for the first time since the Cold War, Grossi’s fluency in non-proliferation diplomacy gives him a gravitas that few bureaucrats can match. His candidacy raises a pointed question: should the UN be led by a generalist or a specialist?

And Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica, a former head of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, makes the case that the next Secretary-General must understand development economics as deeply as peacekeeping. In a world where pandemics, migration, and climate-driven displacement are reshaping the security landscape, Grynspan’s background signals that the old firewall between “hard” security issues and “soft” development ones may be obsolete.

The Process: Where diplomacy meets power politics

The selection of a Secretary-General is, on paper, a straightforward affair. Member states nominate candidates. Candidates appear at public town halls at UN headquarters, fielding questions from governments, civil society groups, and journalists. The Security Council votes, needing at least nine affirmative votes and, critically, no veto from any of the five permanent members. The General Assembly then formally appoints the winner. On paper.

In practice, the process is a crucible of great-power negotiation. The United States, China, Russia, France, and Britain each hold a veto, and each has used it – or the threat of it – to shape past selections. A candidate who angers Washington or Beijing can find their campaign extinguished in a closed-door session that the public never sees. The public town halls, introduced in 2016 to bring transparency to a process long criticized as smoke-filled, have added a layer of accountability. But the decisive votes still happen in the Security Council’s consultation room, where power, not performance, carries the day.

This year, the geopolitical backdrop makes the maneuvering even more consequential. The United States is navigating a volatile domestic political landscape. China is pressing for greater influence in international institutions. Russia, ostracized by much of the West over its war in Ukraine, remains a veto-wielding power with every incentive to block candidates it views as adversarial. The result is a selection process that doubles as a litmus test for the state of great-power relations – and those relations are, by most measures, at their worst in decades.

A crisis of legitimacy

The next Secretary-General inherits an institution under siege, not from without, but from within.

Member states are billions of dollars in arrears on their dues, leaving the UN financially hobbled. Peacekeeping missions are overstretched and under-resourced. The Security Council, the body tasked with maintaining international peace, has been paralyzed by vetoes on conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza. The General Assembly, for all its moral authority, passes resolutions that powerful states simply ignore.

For critics, these failures are symptoms of an institution that has outlived its design; a 1945 architecture unable to absorb the shocks of a multipolar century. For defenders, they are evidence that the UN’s member states, not its bureaucracy, are the problem: an organization can only be as effective as its members allow it to be.

The next Secretary-General will have to navigate this tension with unusual dexterity. The job demands someone who can be a vocal advocate for the UN’s founding principles – peace, human rights, dignity – while also being a shrewd internal operator capable of prying loose the institutional inertia that slows its response to crises. It is, in the words of one veteran diplomat, like being asked to steer a ship whose crew keeps changing the rudder.

Regional rivalries and the ghost of rotation

The notion of regional rotation; the informal understanding that the Secretary-Generalship should circulate among the world’s geographic groups; looms over every selection. The Eastern European group has never held the post. The Latin American and Caribbean group last held it in the early 1980s, when Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru served two terms. Africa has never held it, despite supplying a disproportionate share of UN peacekeeping troops and hosting many of its most pressing humanitarian crises.

This year, Latin America and the Caribbean have mounted the most coordinated push in decades, rallying behind Bachelet with nominations from three of the region’s largest economies. Africa’s backing of Sall reflects a similar logic: a continent of 54 member states, the largest voting bloc in the General Assembly, arguing that it is past time for its turn.

But regional solidarity has its limits. Within Latin America, not every government shares the same priorities for the UN. Within Africa, the African Union’s endorsement of a single candidate is never guaranteed – and competing candidacies could fracture the bloc’s leverage. The risk is that regional campaigns cancel each other out, leaving the decision once again to the great powers.

The public stage: A new kind of audition

If the back-room politics remain opaque, the public dimension of this race marks a departure from the UN’s traditionally secretive culture.

Since 2016, candidates have been required to appear at town halls; open forums where they present their visions and face questions from UN ambassadors, civil society leaders, and journalists. The format forces candidates to articulate not just their credentials but their worldview: What would they do about the veto? How would they reform the Security Council? Can they name a moment when they stood up to a powerful government?

The town halls have introduced an element of democratic accountability that was absent for the UN’s first seven decades, when Secretaries-General were effectively chosen in private by a handful of powerful capitals. But the format also raises the stakes: candidates who perform poorly in public can find their support eroding, even if they have the backing of a powerful patron in the Security Council.

This year, the public dimension matters more than ever. The UN is under scrutiny from a generation of citizens who expect transparency and who are skeptical of institutions that operate behind closed doors. A Secretary-General who cannot communicate compellingly; in public, on the record; will struggle to rally the global public around the UN’s mission.

What the Candidates Reveal About the UN’s Future

Each candidacy encodes a theory of the institution.

Bachelet’s bid says the UN needs a leader who can speak with moral clarity, even when it offends powerful states. Her tenure as High Commissioner for Human Rights was marked by a willingness to call out abuses in places like China’s Xinjiang region; a stance that won her applause from rights groups but also made her enemies among the permanent members of the Security Council. If elected, she would bring a human rights lens to every crisis, from war zones to pandemics. She would also face the question of whether moral authority, without great-power support, can translate into institutional action.

Sall’s candidacy says the UN needs a head of state’s pragmatism — someone who understands that peace is impossible without development, and that the Global South’s grievances cannot be managed from a comfortable distance. His experience leading Senegal, a stable democracy in a volatile region, gives him credibility on the intersection of governance, security, and economic inclusion. But his record is not without controversy: critics note that his domestic tenure included a controversial bid for a third term, which raised questions about his commitment to democratic norms.

Grossi’s profile makes a different argument: that in an era of renewed nuclear anxiety, the UN needs a leader who understands the machinery of arms control and non-proliferation from the inside. His stewardship of the IAEA during the Iran nuclear negotiations and the Fukushima water-release controversy has demonstrated a capacity for technical diplomacy under intense political pressure. But the IAEA is a specialized agency; running the entire UN system is a task of far broader scope, and critics question whether a technocrat can inspire the kind of political coalition-building the top job demands.

Grynspan’s presence in the race signals that the UN’s future may hinge on its ability to address the root causes of instability – poverty, inequality, climate-driven displacement – rather than merely managing their symptoms. Her record at ECLAC and the UN Conference on Trade and Development gives her deep expertise in the economics of development. The question is whether economic expertise, however essential, can carry the political weight required to broker peace deals and stand up to aggressors.

The Veto problem

No analysis of the Secretary-General selection is complete without reckoning with the veto; and this year, it may be the decisive factor.

The five permanent members of the Security Council – the United States, China, Russia, France, and Britain – have divergent and often conflicting interests. A candidate acceptable to Washington may be unacceptable to Beijing. A candidate who earns Moscow’s tolerance may raise alarm in London and Paris. The task of finding someone who can thread this needle, appeasing the great powers while maintaining the independence the job requires, is the central paradox of the selection process.

In past races, the veto has functioned as a negative filter: it eliminates candidates who are too controversial, too closely aligned with one power, or too willing to challenge the status quo. What emerges is often the least objectionable candidate; a figure agreeable enough to avoid a veto but perhaps uninspiring enough to avoid making a difference.

This year, the risk of a protracted deadlock is real. If the P5 cannot agree on a candidate, the process could stretch into the fall, creating a leadership vacuum at precisely the moment the UN can least afford one. The institution’s critics would seize on such a deadlock as further evidence that the UN is paralyzed by the very power structures it was designed to manage.

The stakes

The Secretary-General of the United Nations is often called the world’s top diplomat. It is a flattering title that obscures an uncomfortable truth: the job’s formal powers are remarkably thin. The Secretary-General commands no army, levies no taxes, and enforces no laws. The position’s influence rests almost entirely on the power of persuasion; the ability to convene, to cajole, to shame, and to inspire.

And yet, the role matters. In moments of crisis, the Secretary-General is often the only figure who can pick up the phone to any head of state on the planet. The position carries a unique moral authority – not because the officeholder is always right, but because the institution they represent embodies a set of principles that the world, for all its cynicism, still claims to believe in.

The next Secretary-General will take office at a moment when those principles are under assault. Wars are proliferating. Democratic norms are eroding. Climate change is accelerating. The rules-based international order, fragile even at its post-Cold War peak, is fraying. The UN’s relevance is not guaranteed; it must be earned, year after year, crisis after crisis.

Whoever wins this race will not be able to fix the institution alone. But they will set its tone, define its priorities, and determine whether the United Nations can still make the case, to skeptical capitals and an indifferent public, that the world is better off with it than without it.

The race is underway. The world is watching. And the answer will shape far more than who occupies an office in New York.

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