The UN's changing of the guard

The U.N.’s marquee election, the appointment of a new secretary-general, is at least a year off. But the changing of the guard at the United Nations is already well underway. Candidates are actively vying for the top jobs next year at the U.N. Development Programme, the International Telecommunications Union, and the UN Refugee Agency. U.N. delegates — led by the ambassadors of South Africa and Romania — have been meeting behind closed doors to produce a set of rules for candidates seeking to replace António Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister, who ends his 10-year tenure at the head of the U.N. in December 2026. They have outlined a timetable for the election process, starting with the announcement of nominations in September. According to an earlier draft resolution, proposed candidates will be required to campaign, as they did during previous elections, release vision statements, sit for questioning by member states, and disclose their financial backers. A coalition of more than 20 member states — the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency Group, the so-called ACT Group — has introduced a similar set of proposals, including a call for a single seven-year term, aimed at insulating the U.N. chief from political influence. U.N. chiefs currently serve for five years, with the option of a second term. The hope is that this election will not resemble that of a pope, with its medieval protocols and puffs of black and white smoke, to which it has often been compared. The U.N. races are taking place against a backdrop of multiple, overlapping global crises — intrastate wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, backsliding on U.N. development and climate targets, humanitarian crises, and mass killings in Gaza and Sudan. Looming over the process are serious questions about whether the multilateral system can hold it together, particularly at a time when the organization’s biggest funder is cutting back, and whether the U.S. retreat will create a vacuum that will be filled by its rivals, such as China and Russia. “The stakes of this election process are huge, for the United Nations and also for the whole body of international law, norms, and values that live in the U.N. Charter,” said Anjali Dayal, a professor at Fordham University, who has written a paper on the race. “The organization is facing an unprecedented financial crisis precipitated by the hard right turn in U.S. politics, and the same hard right turn in U.S. politics is also threatening to undermine the core purposes of the United Nations.” “The United States, the traditional underwriter of the U.N. system, is today a fundamental destabilizer of the system,” she added. “We are at a point where the organization has never needed visionary, careful leadership more to ensure its survival, but also at a point where the process of selecting that leader makes it really unlikely.” For the U.S., the elections will provide an important test of its ability to wield influence and populate the organization with leaders that share its broader “America First” agenda. For now, the most prestigious American-led organizations, including UNICEF and the World Food Programme, will continue to be led by Biden administration nominees. The five-year term of Cindy McCain, executive director of WFP, doesn’t end until around April 2028, while UNICEF’s executive director, Catherine Russell, is likely to make way for a successor in early 2027. The five-year term of Amy Pope, the director general of the International Organization for Migration, doesn’t end until 2028. If those agencies survive further U.S. funding cuts, a new U.N. secretary-general will decide whether their successors are Americans. “This is not a race for one person,” said Ben Donaldson, adviser to the 1 for 8 Billion, an advocacy group committed to broadening the category of individuals who run the world body. “We see this as a race for the next 40 or 50 U.N. leaders. That’s the sort of number we’re talking about that the next secretary-general will be appointing soon after they come into office.” It remains unclear what impact U.S. budget cuts will have on the U.S. ability to maintain its virtual monopoly on those top jobs, but U.N. observers say it has virtually no chance of leading organizations such as UNDP, which receives a small portion of its budget from the U.S., or the refugee agency, particularly at a time when the U.S. has sharply scaled back its refugee resettlement program, offering a rare bit of generosity to white South African Afrikaners. The International Telecommunications Union But the U.S. has shown interest in one election. On June 18, the State Department announced it was nominating ITU’s Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin for reelection in November 2026. Bogdan-Martin — who was nominated by the Biden administration — is the first woman to lead the agency since its founding in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union to facilitate cross-border telecommunications. Bogdan-Martin then beat out a Russian candidate, Rashid Ismailov — a former deputy minister of Russia’s communications ministry and a former executive at the Chinese telecom company Huawei — and replaced Chinese national Houlin Zhao, who ran ITU for eight years. “It is very hopeful and encouraging that the United States is engaging in the ITU,” said Konstantinos Komaitis, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Digital Forensic Research Lab. “It seems to be consistent with what we’ve heard so far from the Trump administration vis-à-vis technology and the fact that technology and digital continue to be one of the priorities of this administration.” But he said the broader U.S. approach to the U.N. — including its rejection of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and failure to send a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva or New York this far into Donald Trump’s presidency — is troubling. But he praised Bogdan-Martin, saying she has supported multi-stakeholder governance and that “she appreciates that in a highly complex digital environment, you really need to have multiple voices in order to be able to try to figure out how best to govern this thing called the internet.” Still, the U.N. retreat from multilateralism has provided an opportunity for other countries to demonstrate leadership at the U.N. The U.N. Development Programme The race for the top U.N. development job, pits early front-runners former Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo against the U.N.under-secretary-general for disarmament, Izumi Nakamitsu of Japan, who is well regarded by the U.N. chief. Other candidates include Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, a Greek-French gynecologist who served as minister of state for development, francophonie and international partnerships, and former UNDP official and U.N. special adviser on reform Jens Christian Wandel of Denmark. One U.N. insider told Devex that Guterres had personally urged Wandel to enter the race, suggesting he may be among his favorites. “It was his initiative, not Copenhagen’s,” the insider said. Norway’s former education and environment minister, Bård Vegar Solhjell, recently withdrew from the running after the U.N. extended the deadline for a decision from June until later in the year. Solhjell apparently got tired of the wait and took another job. The U.S., which provides relatively little funding to the development agency, appears not to be in the running — though one U.N. insider said that former USAID Administrator Mark Green has been pressing the Trump administration to nominate him for the job. But a source close to the former USAID official told Devex months ago that Green was not angling for the job. The transition comes at a time when the state of international development is in crisis, with the dismantling of the world’s leading aid agency, the U.S. International Agency for Development, and cutbacks from other traditional donors. The U.N., meanwhile, is bracing for large-scale staff cuts and the potential merger of U.N. agencies. “The confidence that development works has been severely eroded in my mind, sadly, very often for ideological reasons rather than for factual reasons,” Achim Steiner, the outgoing German leader of UNDP, told Devex’s Adva Saldinger in a recent exit interview. “I actually would argue development has worked remarkably well, if you look at it on a basis of investment, and a rate of return.” Steiner, who led the U.N. development agency during the past 10 years, has temporarily turned over the reins to Associate Administrator Haoliang Xu of China, who began his stint as interim acting administrator on June 17. A new leader, however, will have to prove the agency’s relevance. “The next leader at UNDP will have to face the fact that the U.N.’s continuing role in international development is in question,” Richard Gowan, the U.N. representative for the International Crisis Group, told Devex. “China is keen to gain more influence over U.N. development efforts, but traditional donors are drifting away.” UN Refugee Agency Other key races include the leadership battle at UNHCR, where France is facing off with candidates from Switzerland and Germany. The French government has nominated Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who announced late last year that she wouldn’t seek a third term in the March 2026 municipal elections. The Swiss are backing Swiss diplomat and Migration Minister Christine Schraner Burgener, who is viewed widely as the front-runner, while Germany nominated Niels Annen. Belgium’s former Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration Nicole de Moor is also reportedly making a run for the job. There have been rumors for more than a year that Sigrid Kaag, a Dutch politician and diplomat who currently serves as the acting U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, is interested in leading the agency. “Whoever takes over UNHCR will need to focus on sorting out the organization's division of responsibilities with IOM. In the current financial chaos, a lot of diplomats and UN officials have been speculating that the two agencies could merge altogether,” Gowan said in an email. “I don't think that a merger is imminent, but it is an idea that will not go away.” Whisper campaign The secretary-general race has not officially begun, but the whisper campaign has been underway for more than a year. It has also coincided with a civil society movement to press for the selection of the U.N.’s first female leader in the organization’s 80-year history. Public attention has focused on big-name politicians and diplomats, including prominent figures from Latin America and the Caribbean. Latin America believes it is its time to lead the organization, as one of its own has not led the organization in more than 30 years, when Peruvian diplomat Javier Pérez de Cuéllar became secretary-general. Among the names making the rounds at U.N. headquarters are Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, a generational public orator who has highlighted global inequality; former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet; Mexican Environment Minister and former U.N. official Alicia Bárcena; and María Fernanda Espinosa, a former minister of defense and foreign affairs of Ecuador, who serves as an executive director of GWL Voices, which has been advocating for the U.N. to appoint the first woman in the organization’s 80 years. Mottley, however, recently announced she had plans to lead her country’s labor party in general elections, suggesting she would not be in play for the top U.N. spot. Costa Rican economist Rebeca Grynspan, who runs the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development and played a pivotal role in managing the Black Sea Grain deal, has been something of a sleeper candidate. If she were to win, she would not only be the first woman to lead the organization but also the first Jewish secretary-general. The case for a female candidate has been bolstered by an agreement among Latin American leaders to urge countries in the region to nominate women for the role, part of an effort to break an 80-year male monopoly on the world’s most prestigious diplomatic jobs. In April, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States issued a statement saying “it is timely and appropriate” that a national from the region be selected as the next secretary-general, noting that the region has only held the position once. It also noted that the position has never been held by a woman. “It's time for women,” Bárcena told Wired en Español. “The United Nations must be led by someone from Latin America, and I will support any woman who runs for office from this region.” But the U.S. and Russia have pushed back on the notion that women should be advantaged in the race, encouraging men to take their chances. On April 25, Bolivia, which signed onto a joint agreement encouraging a woman secretary-general, became the first and only country to formally nominate a candidate, a man, putting forward Bolivian Vice President David Choquehuanca. The Argentine head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, is also said to be interested in the job — though his recent statement challenging President Trump’s claim that U.S. bunker-busting bombs obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities could derail his prospects. “Trump’s election upended the nascent secretary-general race,” Gowan said. “A year ago, it was conventional wisdom that the next U.N. leader would be a woman and probably a development expert. That favored candidates like Mia Mottley. Now we are in an upside-down world in which diplomats say that the U.S. will insist on a man.” But making the case for leadership at a time of intense geopolitical rivalry will require some diplomatic sleight of hand. How, for instance, can a candidate voice support for key U.N. objectives, from the Sustainable Development Goals to climate change, favored by the wider U.N. membership without alienating the U.S.? In the end, the winner may be just as likely to be someone who is not even on the radar. “The process is really unpredictable right now. I would say it’s probably unlikely that the winning candidate is someone we’re talking about right now,” Dayal said. “Any candidate for secretary-general has to put forward a platform that isn’t going to make the Trump administration reject them out of hand, but is also going to be broadly acceptable to the membership of the United Nations.” Traditionally, the secretary-general post has been shared by five regional groups — the Western European and Others group, the Eastern European group, the Latin American and Caribbean group, the Asia-Pacific group, and the African group — through an informal process of regional rotation. Eastern Europe is the only region that has never produced a secretary-general, and many think the next top diplomat will come from that region. Vuk Jeremić, a former Serbian foreign minister and former U.N. General Assembly president who mounted an unsuccessful bid for U.N. secretary-general in 2016, has popped up on the U.N.’s radar in recent months, joining the board of an outfit called DOGE-UN, which is led by a former hostage negotiator for Trump during his first term. But the broader membership has been seeking to give UNGA a greater role in deciding who will lead the organization. The U.N. Charter offers little guidance. It states simply: "The Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council." In practice, the U.N. General Assembly has done little more than rubber-stamp the U.N. Security Council's decision. Every five years, the Security Council’s 15 members meet behind closed doors to conduct a series of secret straw polls to gauge whether a new secretary-general has the nine votes — and no vetoes — required for ascending to the top job. The color-coded ballots include three columns marked “encourage”, “discourage,” or “no opinion expressed.” The five permanent members of the council are given special red ballots. If one of those ballots is marked “discouraged,” the council will conduct additional polls until a winner has been determined. “The reality is that the next generation of U.N. leaders will spend their time managing retreat, retrenchment and redundancies,” Gowan said. “I don’t think the U.N. system as a whole has fully absorbed how bad the financial picture will be in the coming period. There is still a belief that the U.N. can ride out the U.S. cuts by moving people to cheaper duty stations and shaving off staff. I think that a few years from now, it will be clear that bigger reforms are necessary.”