Sawt Falasteen - UN to hold fourth informal poll of secretary-general candidates

After the first three rounds of informal straw polls, Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica held a narrow lead over the other six candidates vying to follow Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Several of the candidates are known to have met with world leaders during the UN's signature diplomatic event at New York headquarters last week.

Rumors have persisted that a compromise candidate could be parachuted into the process at the behest of the powerful five veto-wielding Security Council members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

Guyanese ex-foreign minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett narrowly led the second round of the secret process to pick the next UN chief.

Other candidates include Argentina's Rafael Grossi, the current head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Macky Sall of Senegal, Ecuador's Ivonne A-Baki, Ecuador's Maria Fernanda Espinosa and Uganda's Olara Otunnu.

The outgoing secretary-general, Antonio Guterres of Portugal, ends his second five-year term on December 31, 2026.

Even if a candidate earns the required nine votes from the 15 available in the Security Council, they must also avoid a veto by the five major powers, which are deeply divided.

Once a candidate clears those bars, their name will go to the General Assembly of all UN members for confirmation.

The Security Council straw poll was devised in the early 1980s in an attempt to break a deadlock between two candidates shut down by vetoes.

The informal mechanism has persisted, in various forms, despite criticism from countries opposed to the opaque process.

Each of the 15 Security Council members must anonymously assign each candidate one of three labels: "encourage," "discourage," or "no opinion."

But after an unspecified number of votes, the ballots of the Council's five permanent members will have a different color, making it possible to identify potential vetoes, without knowing which country blackballed any given candidate.

It is tradition that the UN's top job should rotate between different regions.

Under that premise, the role should go to a candidate from Latin America this time. There are many candidates from the region, though Sall and Otunnu hail from Africa.

N.Shalabi--SF-PST