Rebeca Grynspan maintains the lead in the vote for the UN leadership but the number of countries that reject her increases

The path to finding new UN leadership appears to be getting complicated. The fifth informal vote of the Security Council reflects a panorama that is difficult to read, only suitable for those passionate about analyzing the ins and outs of the United Nations. The vote yields an incontrovertible fact: Costa Rican Rebeca Grynspan continues to lead. And he also distances himself from his immediate followers. But that does not mean that the path to replacing António Guterres is already clear, since Costa Rica's experienced politician also accumulates a significant volume of rejections.

Grynspan, 70, has won four of the five votes cast in the last two months. Furthermore, the woman who had stepped on her heels in this process, the Guyanese Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, falls to third place, below the Argentine Rafael Grossi. So much for the good news for your candidacy. Because there are also bad ones. The secretary general of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), a position from which she has taken unpaid leave to focus on the campaign, has lost support in this latest vote: nine of the 15 members of the Security Council have now supported her, compared to ten supports in the last vote. An even more worrying fact: the number of rejections also increases, going from three to six.

Next vote

The problem with this data is that it is not known how many of these rejections come from the five permanent members of the Security Council (United States, China, United Kingdom, France and Russia), those who have the right to veto, who are the ones who ultimately end up deciding who wins this chess game in which geopolitics is combined with personal bets. Everything indicates that this problem will begin to be resolved in the next vote, scheduled for October 16, in which it is expected that the permanent members will already begin to announce what their rejections are. It will be at that moment when the battle enters the most serious phase, because the vetoed candidates will begin to fall.

The outlook is still unclear. Among the seven candidates left in the race, it is clear that the favorite is still Grynspan. But that does not prevent other possibilities from opening up. The first is for a new name to emerge to try to break the current blockade. It is a difficult option, because it is not clear who could unite the support of the big five. And because the emergence of that cover (or cover) would come after months of discussions about the current names. Perhaps it might already be too late for that option.

The other possibility is that this blockade could be extended indefinitely. The rules for the election of the new UN Secretary General only establish that Guterres' mandate ends on December 31 and that on January 1 there should be a new Secretary General. But diplomatic sources do not rule out the option of the unprecedented situation occurring in which this deadline arrives and the countries have not reached an agreement. The new global disorder would thus have a new victim: the governance of the UN.