For most of this year, a relentlessly crowded news cycle has kept the race to succeed António Guterres as U.N. secretary-general out of the main headlines.
So, for those of you who haven’t been following this story, I can tell you that it’s been rather entertaining. Not since 1996, when the United States at the 11th hour lifted its veto on a second term for the Egyptian incumbent Boutros Boutros-Ghali, has the race arrived at such a white-knuckle denouement. As of this writing, it’s still not clear who will replace Guterres when his term expires on Dec. 31, although it may be getting a little clearer.
In terms of the selection process, the successful candidate needs to win a majority of the 15 member states on the U.N. Security Council, 10 of whom are elected to serve temporary terms. They must also avoid one or more vetoes from the five permanent members—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia. Once they have jumped over that hurdle, the Security Council’s nominee is referred to the General Assembly for approval, which is usually a straightforward procedure.
At the beginning of this year, the assumption was that the post would go to a diplomat from Latin America, in keeping with the informal practice of rotating the U.N.’s top post among the world’s regions; and, ideally, a woman, as every secretary-general so far has been male.
Accordingly, the two leading candidates at the start of 2026 were Michele Bachelet, a former president of Chile, and Rafael Grossi, the Argentine diplomat currently at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Happily, Bachelet, who demonized Israel during her 2018-22 tenure as head of the U.N. Human Rights Council, and who is disturbingly close to China, watched her bid tank shortly after Chile’s newly elected conservative government said that it would not support her.
For his part, Grossi, who’s still in the race, appears to be facing stiff opposition from the Russians because of his concerns over the nonproliferation implications stemming from Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and its close relations with Iran.
Until the middle of this month, Grossi’s two main rivals were also from Latin America: Rebeca Grynspan (yes, she’s Jewish), the Costa Rican who currently heads the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development; and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, currently Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Grynspan is perhaps the world body’s in-house candidate in that she is widely respected among the organization’s professional staff and is regarded as being in much the same mold as Guterres. But that begs the question of whether she can implement the radical financial and structural reform of the United Nations, which the United States is demanding. She is also close to China and not known for being particularly sympathetic to Israel.
For all the doubts about Grynspan, Rodrigues-Birkett would be a far worse choice. She has voiced sympathy for Cuba’s communist tyranny and is a vocal supporter of the Chinese regime’s contention that only the People’s Republic can legitimately represent China in international forums, thereby marginalizing democratic Taiwan. She has also defamed Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza post-Oct. 7 as a “veritable genocide.”
In the last three straw polls conducted in the Security Council, neither Grynspan nor Grossi nor Rodrigues-Birkett has managed to secure a commanding lead. In the last straw poll, which Grynspan won by a whisker and which was color-coded to give a sense of where the permanent five members of the Security Council sit, all of them attracted two vetoes each. This fueled speculation that the contest would not be resolved by the end of the year, meaning that Guterres might have to stay on as acting secretary-general until the deadlock is broken.
Then a bombshell landed.
On Oct. 21, Lana Nusseibeh—a talented younger diplomat from the United Arab Emirates with a long record of involvement in U.N. affairs, including 11 years as the UAE’s envoy to the world body—announced that she was entering the race.
Of Palestinian descent and hailing from one of Jerusalem’s most prominent Arab families, Nusseibeh has on occasion been harshly critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Yet she has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the Abraham Accords between Israel and various Muslim-majority states, including the UAE, as well as being a graduate of the highly regarded program in Israel Studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (where her academic supervisor described her as “a brilliant student who wrote some wonderfully insightful and incisive essays on Zionism and Israeli history”).
Expressions of support for Nusseibeh quickly landed from the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt and Jordan, as well as a handful of countries in Europe, including NATO member Greece. Several diplomatic luminaries have backed her, among them Nikolai Mladenov, the head of the Board of Peace charged with stabilizing the Gaza Strip; and Brett McGurk, who served as a leading national security official under four separate presidents, including Donald Trump.
The United States has not made its position known, but there has been speculation in recent days that rumored alternative candidates being floated by Washington, such as former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, are only in the frame so that U.S. diplomats can more convincingly persuade their colleagues that Nusseibeh is the right compromise candidate.
It would be mistaken to regard Nusseibeh as a shoo-in at this juncture. Turkey, a rival to the UAE in terms of regional influence, is considering throwing its own candidate into the fray, in the form of veteran diplomat Feridun Sinirlioğlu. Twenty years ago, Sinirlioğlu was Ankara’s ambassador in Tel Aviv; these days, he loyally echoes the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish tropes promoted by his boss, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while defending, with no sense of irony, Turkey’s illegal occupation of the northern part of Cyprus.
We should expect the drama and intrigue to continue as we edge perilously closer to Guterres’s departure date. But above and beyond that, the question of why anyone should ultimately care about the outcome remains pertinent.
For American Jews and Israelis, this is a particularly important question.
The United Nations is the body that passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. It engages in structural discrimination against Israel in violation of the “sovereign equality” principle enshrined in the U.N. Charter. It provides a home for one of the most egregious and vicious antisemites on earth, Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur “on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” When its officials do speak out on antisemitism, their words are so cloying and disingenuous that one wishes they had just stayed quiet.
Yet despite all that, a shoulder-shrugging dismissal of all the candidates, along with the world body itself, is not the wisest response. Like it or not, Israel has to deal with it. Like it or not, Israel needs the support of the United States in the corridors and meeting rooms of the United Nations. Like it or not, the United Nations will retain its antisemitic fixation on Israel’s alleged abuses, largely ignoring true rogue states like Iran and North Korea, until it is stopped from doing so.
For those reasons and more, the organization needs a secretary-general who can work productively with the United States, particularly in the coming five years, when the situation in Gaza will continue to be a major component of her (or his) agenda. It also needs a leader who will stamp out its chronic waste of resources and crack down on propaganda organs like its “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.”
Might Lana Nusseibeh be such a candidate?
It would be foolish to make that prediction now, as promising as she may seem in comparison to her rivals. Yet she is certainly more open-minded when it comes to Israel than the rest of the hopefuls. Keep an eye, then, on where this race is headed.
