As the race to elect the next UN Secretary-General enters its final phase, former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan retains a challenging lead, but a new contender is emerging, as UAE Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh announced her candidacy this week.
The growing excitement around the race is also fueled by the prospect of a female UN secretary-general, something that has never happened in the UN’s more than 80-year history.
As part of a complex election process, an informal straw poll of officials in the deciding United Nations Security Council last week gave Grynspan a narrow lead over her closest competitors: Guyana’s former Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett and Argentina’s International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi.
But after receiving two opposing votes the race has been relaunched allowing new candidates to participate.
The winner needs at least nine votes from the 15-member UN Security Council without opposition from any of the five permanent members — the US, the UK, France, China and Russia — and they have until the end of December to choose the successor to current UN chief Antonio Gutteres, before the UN General Assembly confirms the appointment.
Campaigning alongside Grynspan, Grossi and Rodrigues-Birkett are former Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa, former Senegalese President Macky Sall, former UN Under-Secretary-General Olara Otunnu of Uganda, and Ecuadorian diplomat Ivonne A-Baki.
UAE’s Nusseibeh announced as fresh contender
Senior UAE diplomat and UAE Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh energised the race when her nomination was announced this week, known for her versatility in “quiet diplomacy” in the campaign for peace and for creating space for wider political settlements.
Launching her candidacy, Nusseibeh said, “I have spent much of my professional life working in and around the United Nations, and I have seen first-hand what determined diplomacy can achieve – countries with profound differences finding common ground, and agreement where people said agreement was impossible.”
In her vision statement, she puts peace and security at the core while also promising to deliver across the board on development and human rights, as well as reform the organisation around focus and results.
“I am standing to be secretary-general because I believe this is a moment to act with greater urgency: to act earlier, bring people together across difference, and drive the work forward until it produces concrete results,” she said.
“I wish to offer myself to this office as I would serve it: speaking frankly with every government and answering to none.”
A highly regarded diplomat who grew up between Abu Dhabi and the UK in a family of well-known political figures, Nusseibeh previously served as the UAE ambassador to the UN and is credited with elevating the UAE’s profile during that time.
Nusseibeh, 48, who led the UAE’s successful bid for a Security Council seat, said that several countries approached her during the last UN General Assembly and urged her to stand.
“It’s recognised today that we need someone who offers generational change for the organisation,” she said.
During the country’s 2022 to 2023 term, Nusseibeh secured the adoption of Resolution 2720, which opened the way for humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza. A Hebrew speaker, she said she secured support for the resolution by arranging visits from Council members to the Rafah border crossing.
If she succeeds, Nusseibeh would become the first woman to lead the United Nations since its establishment in 1945, the first of Palestinian descent, and the second Secretary-General from the Arabic-speaking world after Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
“I think it would be great if the next secretary-general is a woman, but I am not running because I am a woman, I am running because I am stubbornly optimistic about the future of the United Nations and I believe we need someone who is relentless in the pursuit of diplomacy to open doors,” Nusseibeh said on Wednesday.
Grynspan holds a challenging lead
Costa Rica’s former Vice President Rebeca Grynspan, 70, was born to Jewish parents who fled Poland before World War II, and she has built a Jewish family ever since. She lost her grandparents in the Holocaust after they decided to remain in Poland.
In a May interview with Euronews, Grynspan said, “I know exactly what wars take away from you and what peace allows you to do.”
“I am a generation that have lived in peace. I have never experienced war directly. But millions of people in the world today live in war zones, in conflict. And that is why I am running, because I know the difference, what peace and opportunity can do for you and your family,” she told Euronews.
Currently Secretary-General of the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Grynspan said she agreed with US President Donald Trump’s “constructive” criticism that “the UN has great potential, but it’s not living up to that potential,” and that a reformed UN can make a difference.
Grynspan told Euronews how she believes that in our multipolar world “the choice is if we will have multipolarity with multilateralism that bears the promise of prosperity and cooperation, or if we will have multipolarity without multilateralism that will lead us to fragmentation into a world that will be more unstable, more prone to conflict, and less prosper.”
“So we need to create again these spaces. For the convergence of divergent interests,” she added.
On the other hand, she also hailed the “amazing things that are happening in the world: you look at technology and you look at the digital world, the artificial intelligence, what is happening in medicine and in science.”
“You see those breakthroughs that you can bring to the people on the ground, to the millions of people that have right now no opportunity, that live in poverty, in absolute destitution or in hunger.“
“And you know that the world is developing really the capacity, the possibility for everybody to have a dignified life. That will depend on us. It will depend on our choices,” Grynspan explained in an interview for Euronews.
She said that the UN election race was “not like a business-as-usual type of election.”
“Conflicts in the world are going up. Trust between the countries, but also in the multilateral system, is going down. And time is running out,” Grynspan told Euronews as she presented the vision of her candidacy to become the new UN secretary-general.
“So this is a moment in which we have to raise to the challenge to bring cooperation, solidarity, the principles of the UN Charter again into the center of the agenda,” she concluded.