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TWN
Info Service on Climate Change (Aug26/04) UN Security Council Straw Polls Narrow Secretary-General Race Geneva, 22 August (D Ravi Kanth) - The race for the next UN Secretary-General is beginning to take clearer shape following the second straw poll of the Security Council, held last Friday (21 August). The eventual candidate will need to secure at least nine votes from the Security Council’s fifteen members, which include all five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States)—who crucially hold veto power over candidates—and ten non-permanent members (Bahrain, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Pakistan, Panama, and Somalia), who do not. Once agreement is reached, the name is passed to the General Assembly for endorsement, which tends to be a formality. Consequently, this is a selection process, not an election—contrary to what some media reports seem to suggest. So far, the two straw polls of Security Council members have been anonymous, leaving a lack of clarity about the voting preferences of individual members (and, crucially, of the permanent members), with only the totals under each of the three voting categories—encourage, discourage, and no opinion—being made public. As a result, those who focus on the "encourage" votes—particularly in the Anglo-Saxon media, which is accustomed to a "first-past-the-post" voting system—are likely to miss the larger picture, said an analyst who preferred not to be quoted. For example, "discourage" votes are equally important in this process, given that if any one of those comes from a permanent member, the candidature is effectively over. Moreover, the more discourage votes a candidate accumulates, the harder it becomes to amass the minimum of nine total votes needed. From the Friday poll (21 August), only Olara Otunnu from Uganda saw an increase in encourage votes compared with the first poll. Along with Macky Sall (the former President of Senegal), his discourage votes remained the same—albeit already at a quite high level. Significantly, Rebecca Grynspan and Rafael Grossi (two early frontrunners) saw large increases in discourage votes (by three and four, respectively), although Grossi retained the same number of encouragements. According to a senior Latin American diplomat in Geneva, speaking anonymously, "Grossi faces increased resistance, meaning his less rounded profile, the less palatable group with which he is affiliated, and the brashness of the current leadership of his country may be catching up with him." Michelle Bachelet saw the biggest drop in encourage votes and—along with Sall and Grossi—will likely struggle to hit the required vote target. The latest entrant to the race, Ivonne A-Baki (from Ecuador, nominated by Tonga), has clearly impressed nobody, receiving the largest number of discouragements and no opinions. Maria Fernanda Espinosa remains the outlier, with the highest number of "no opinions" but the smallest number of discouragements (along with Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, who is now considered the frontrunner). From all this, it appears that Sall, Bachelet, Grossi, and A-Baki have little hope of reaching the finish line and would help the process if they withdrew. Given that there is broad agreement, following UN practice, that the chosen candidate should come from Latin America, that would seem to leave three credible contenders: Espinosa, Grynspan, and Rodrigues-Birkett. As the senior Latin American diplomat suggested, "the idea of a woman from the GRULAC region has gained ground." The other candidate who still has a chance of gaining votes is Otunnu, but given that a representative from the African continent has held two of the last four Secretary-General positions, and that his CV does not suggest a candidate of remarkable talent or experience compared with the others, it is unclear why he should remain in the race. Even so, finding agreement will not be easy. However, a closer examination of the respective experiences and skills of the three candidates best positioned to achieve broad consensus would surely help identify the right person for the world’s top diplomatic job, the analyst said. ends
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