Next UN Secretary General Selected
Former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres is set to become the next United Nations secretary-general, after the 15 Security Council members agreed to put his name forward to a formal vote. Guterres, who was head of the UN’s refugee agency for 10 years until 2015, emerged as the Security Council’s runaway favorite after the latest in a series of straw polls on Wednesday.
Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the UN and current Security Council president, told reporters that Guterres would face a vote in the Security Council on Thursday(6) . “Today, after our sixth straw poll we have a clear favorite, and his name is Antonio Guterres,” he said. Sixth straw poll The secretary-general of the UN is appointed in a two-stage process. A candidate is first recommended by the Security Council, and must then be approved by the 193-member General Assembly. Thirteen candidates entered the race, necessitating a series of straw polls held by the Security Council to encourage a thinning of the field and to help to settle on a single candidate. In every ballot, the 15 Security Council members assessed each candidate by voting either “encourage,” ”discourage” or “no opinion”.
In the latest vote, Guterres received 13 “encourage” votes, no “discourage” votes and two votes of “no opinion.” The next closest candidates, Vuk Jeremic of Serbia and Miroslav Lajcak of the Slovak Republic, each received seven “encourage” votes and six “discourage” votes, while Bulgaria’s Irina Bokova received seven “encourage” votes and seven “discourage” votes. Guterres, 67, will replace the incumbent secretary-general, South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon, whose second five-year term ends on December 31. While there is technically no limit to the number of terms a secretary-general may serve, none has held office for more than two terms. Former Portuguese PM Guterres, a trained engineer who worked as an assistant professor before entering politics in 1974, led his country from 1995 to 2002 as head of the Socialist Party.
