The race to choose the next secretary-general of the United Nations has entered its decisive stage, and it still has no winner. An informal straw poll held by the UN Security Council on Friday placed Rebeca Grynspan, the former vice president of Costa Rica and current head of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), narrowly ahead of the field, according to people close to the process cited by Reuters. But every candidate drew opposition from at least two of the Council's five veto-holding permanent members, which means nobody has yet assembled the backing needed to secure the job. With less than three months left before Secretary-General Antonio Guterres leaves office on 31 December, the contest is now a test of patience, diplomacy, and veto arithmetic.
The result underlines a paradox of this year's selection. Grynspan has led four of the five most recent straw polls, yet her lead has never hardened into a consensus. Each ballot has confirmed her as the frontrunner without delivering the decisive breakthrough that would turn a lead into a recommendation. That pattern held again in the sixth poll, and it has opened the door to a possibility that diplomats are now openly discussing: new candidates could still enter the race.
What the sixth straw poll showed
In the sixth secret ballot, Grynspan received nine "encourage" votes, five "discourage" votes, and one "no opinion" vote from the 15 members of the Security Council, according to people close to the process. Crucially, two of the five "discourage" votes came from permanent members of the Council, the five powers that hold a veto over the recommendation. That matters because a candidate cannot be recommended if any permanent member records a "discourage" vote against them, no matter how much support they attract from the rest of the Council.
Guyana's ambassador to the UN, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, finished close behind with eight votes in favour, six against, and one "no opinion," again with two opposing votes from permanent members. Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recorded a near-identical result to Rodrigues-Birkett, but with one fewer permanent member supporting his bid, according to the same reporting. The clustering at the top is the story of this race: three credible candidates, none of them able to shake off veto-level opposition.
The sixth poll also introduced a procedural change that made the veto problem visible for the first time. For the first time in this selection, the ballot used colour-coded papers revealing whether opposition came from a veto power, rather than leaving that detail hidden inside the totals. Diplomats and observers said the change marked the race's entry into a decisive stage, because it forces candidates and their backers to confront exactly where their blocking votes sit instead of guessing.
Who is Rebeca Grynspan?
Grynspan, 70, is a Costa Rican economist with one of the longest resumes in multilateral diplomacy. She served as second vice president of Costa Rica from 1994 to 1998, holding cabinet posts covering housing and the coordination of economic and social affairs, and later as deputy finance minister. She then moved into senior UN roles, including associate administrator of the United Nations Development Programme from 2010 to 2014, and secretary-general of the Ibero-American General Secretariat from 2014 to 2021, which brings together Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries.
Since September 2021 she has led UNCTAD, now known as UN Trade and Development, becoming the first woman to head the organisation. In that role she has been a prominent voice on trade, inequality, and crisis response, and she co-chaired the UN's Global Crisis Response Group on food, energy, and finance. She is widely credited with a central role in the Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered between the UN, Turkiye, Russia, and Ukraine, which enabled the export of tens of millions of tons of grain and helped bring down global food prices during the war in Ukraine. Supporters present that record as evidence that she can broker deals across bitter divides; critics of the selection process, rather than of her personally, have at times questioned whether a frontrunner from a small state can command the political weight the job now demands.
Grynspan was nominated by Costa Rica in March 2026. Her candidacy carries additional symbolic weight: if elected, she would become the first woman to lead the United Nations since its founding in 1945, a milestone that has shaped much of the public debate around this selection. Five of the candidates in the field are women, and the question of whether the organisation is ready to break an 80-year pattern has run through the campaign from its earliest straw polls.
The other contenders
Seven candidates were in the running as the race reached its decisive stage. Rodrigues-Birkett, Guyana's permanent representative to the UN and a former foreign minister, has been Grynspan's closest rival throughout, topping one poll in August and finishing second in most others. Her backers point to her experience running a foreign ministry and representing a small state on the Security Council itself.
Grossi, the Argentine diplomat who has led the IAEA since 2019, brings the most direct experience of nuclear diplomacy, including the inspection and monitoring work that sits at the centre of several of the world's most dangerous standoffs. Macky Sall, the former president of Senegal and former chairperson of the African Union, offers the most conventional head-of-state profile in the field. Olara Otunnu of Uganda, a former UN special representative for children and armed conflict, and Maria Fernanda Espinosa of Ecuador, a former president of the UN General Assembly and former foreign minister, round out the field alongside Ivonne A-Baki of Ecuador, a former ambassador to the United States and Qatar.
The field has already narrowed from its earlier shape, with some early entrants withdrawing as the straw polls made the state of play clearer. That winnowing is normal in a selection process that is designed to converge: each informal ballot is meant to tell candidates, and the governments behind them, whether a path to consensus exists or whether it is time to step aside.
How the selection actually works
The UN secretary-general is not chosen by a public election. Under Article 97 of the UN Charter, the Security Council recommends a candidate to the General Assembly, which then formally appoints the next secretary-general. In practice, the Council's recommendation is decisive: the Assembly has never overturned it. The secretary-general serves a five-year term, and the successor to Guterres will take office on 1 January 2027.
The straw polls are the engine of the process. They are informal, secret ballots in which each of the 15 Council members marks each candidate "encourage," "discourage," or "no opinion." To be recommended, a candidate needs at least nine "encourage" votes and no "discourage" vote from any of the five permanent members: Russia, China, the United States, France, and Britain. That dual test is what makes the race so hard to close. A candidate can win a majority of the Council and still be blocked if a single permanent member objects.
Alongside the straw polls, candidates have taken part in interactive dialogues at the General Assembly, where member states and other stakeholders question them on their priorities, and a public town hall was held in July. Those sessions give the wider membership a voice in a process that the Charter formally reserves to the Council, and they have become an established part of modern selections even though they carry no binding vote.
Why nobody has broken through
The sixth poll exposed the structural problem facing every frontrunner. Grynspan reached the nine-vote threshold, but two veto holders opposed her. Rodrigues-Birkett fell one vote short of nine while drawing the same level of veto opposition. Grossi sat in a similar position. In other words, the race is not short of plausible winners; it is short of a candidate whom all five permanent members are willing to accept at the same time.
That is why diplomats say the door remains open to new entrants. When no candidate can clear the veto test, governments that sat out the early rounds may calculate that a fresh face, unburdened by the "discourage" votes already banked against the current field, could break the deadlock. New candidates have entered late in previous selections, and the current stalemate gives that option real weight. At the same time, late entry is a gamble: a newcomer has little time to build a record in the straw polls before the Council must produce a recommendation.
The geopolitical backdrop makes consensus harder. The Council's permanent members are divided over the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, over trade and technology, and over the future of the UN itself. European leaders have been meeting to coordinate support for Ukraine even as the United States has pressed Kyiv on the terms of its own backing, and Russian drone barrages have continued to hit Ukrainian cities and power infrastructure. A secretary-general who must work with all five veto powers has to be acceptable to governments that disagree profoundly about those conflicts.
What the next leader will inherit
Whoever wins will take over an organisation under unusual strain. The next secretary-general will have to manage several active wars, a funding squeeze driven by cutbacks in American contributions, and questions about the UN's relevance as Washington has pulled out of dozens of its agencies. The job combines crisis diplomacy with the management of a sprawling bureaucracy, and the new chief will be expected to reform the institution while simultaneously asking member states to pay for it.
Money is the most immediate pressure. The United States is running a budget deficit close to $2 trillion, and the political appetite in Washington for funding international institutions has thinned. A secretary-general who cannot make a credible case for the UN's value to a sceptical American administration will struggle to close the funding gap, while one who is seen as too close to Washington will lose trust elsewhere. Balancing those audiences is the central political skill the job now demands.
There is also the question of what the secretary-general can actually deliver. The office carries immense moral authority but limited hard power: it cannot compel a ceasefire, override a veto, or force a member state to fund a programme. Its influence comes from mediation, agenda-setting, and the ability to frame a crisis in terms that make inaction costly for the powerful. The candidates' town halls and dialogues have accordingly focused less on grand promises and more on practical questions: how to keep aid corridors open, how to protect civilians, and how to keep the UN's humanitarian machinery functioning when the politics around it are frozen.
What happens next
The Council has less than three months to produce a recommendation before Guterres's term ends. Expect further straw polls in the coming weeks, each one narrowing the field or confirming the deadlock. If a candidate begins shedding "discourage" votes from permanent members, that will be the signal that a consensus is forming. If the numbers stay stuck, expect serious discussion of new entrants or of a compromise candidate drawn from outside the current frontrunners.
Once the Council agrees on a name, the General Assembly will formally appoint the winner, and attention will shift immediately to the transition: the new secretary-general will need a team, a set of priorities for the first hundred days, and a plan for the funding negotiations that will dominate the early months of the term. For now, though, the race remains what the sixth poll showed it to be: a contest with a clear leader, no winner, and a clock that is running down.
The field is still growing: UAE ambassador Lana Nusseibeh has entered the race for UN Secretary-General, adding a prominent Gulf diplomat to the contest.
Sources: Reuters reporting on the sixth straw poll (16 October 2026); PassBlue coverage of earlier straw polls; public biographical records for the candidates.