The Role of the Next Secretary-General in the Shrinking United Nations

The selection of the next United Nations (UN) Secretary-General has begun, as António Guterres is scheduled to vacate the office at the end of 2026, in line with the customary practice of stepping down after two five-year terms. Throughout UN history, each Secretary-General has brought a distinct character to the role, and the Guterres era has been a decade marked by the decline of multilateralism. Who will inherit a shrinking Organization, and what should we expect from the next Secretary-General? This article outlines the selection process, briefly introduces the current candidates, and discusses what it means to be the next Secretary-General.

Politics of the Secretary-General Selection Process

The UN Charter is brief on the selection process for the Secretary-General (Article 97), stating only that the General Assembly appoints the Secretary-General recommended by the Security Council. An uncodified rule holds that the Secretary-General should not be a national of any of the five permanent members of the Security Council and that the position should rotate among regions. In practice, past officeholders have been former foreign ministers or ambassadors (see Table 1).

Table 1: Names, Countries of Origin, Terms, and Backgrounds of Past UN Secretaries-General

Source: Created by the author

As the Security Council puts forward a single name to the General Assembly, any candidate likely to be opposed by the Council—particularly its permanent members—will not stand a chance of being elected or re-elected.[1] The first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, resigned without completing his second term in the wake of the deepening US-Soviet rivalry, having lost favor with both sides over the Korean War. Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, who developed the UN strategy for conflict resolution through the 1992 An Agenda for Peace, abandoned his aspirations for a second term after facing objections from Washington, D.C., following the failure of the US-led interventions in Somalia.

Accordingly, the most important qualification for any Secretary-General is not charisma or leadership but the ability to avoid the Security Council veto. Once elected, however, the Secretary-General plays an irreplaceable role in advancing the framework for international cooperation. The second Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, established peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in response to conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, while the neutral multinational force envisioned in the UN Charter failed to take off with the onset of the Cold War. After Hammarskjöld died en route to mediate a ceasefire in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, U Thant, who served as acting Secretary-General, raised awareness of environmental issues as early as the 1960s and helped establish research institutions such as the United Nations University. Kofi Annan, who after the Cold War succeeded Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the end of his single term on the premise that his replacement should come from Africa, strengthened PKOs and reached a global consensus on the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015). Ban Ki-moon followed, navigating the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (2016–2030) and the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The selection of the Secretary-General, long the Security Council’s exclusive prerogative, began to thaw a decade ago, toward the end of Ban Ki-moon’s tenure. In 2015, Costa Rica, Estonia, Croatia, Namibia, and civil society groups led efforts to secure a General Assembly resolution affirming the importance of transparency in the Secretary-General selection process. Although the voting process itself did not change, informal hearings and dialogue sessions were established to allow candidates to state their views and answer questions.[2] As a result, the number of candidates in the 2016 campaign nearly doubled (13 compared with seven in 2006, when Ban Ki-moon was elected). This split the vote within the Council, particularly among the non-permanent members. After five informal rounds of polling, Guterres—who, in the end, “was not disliked by any government” —emerged as the final candidate.[3]

Immediately after taking office, Guterres launched organizational reforms, reshuffling departments and offices across peace and security, development, and administration. However, it remains unclear whether and how these reforms were meaningful or successful.[4] Since the second Trump administration halted foreign aid and called for a new international mechanism for reconstruction in Gaza, the UN’s main preoccupation has been its survival rather than lifesaving.[5] Yet the UN’s legitimacy crisis predated the Trump awakening. In Africa, UN missions had been asked to leave Mali and Sudan; refugee assistance in Palestine had become the target of physical and rhetorical attacks; and peacebuilding in Afghanistan had been reversed by the return of the Taliban regime.

Electing the Next Secretary-General

Who will lead the UN forward now? It is widely seen as Latin America’s turn—though that is by no means certain—and as of October 2026, there are seven candidates (see Table 2). A public debate was held in the UN General Assembly Hall on 23 July, and the Security Council conducted its first informal straw poll a week later. Straw polling is the initial phase of preliminary voting, in which all Council members use the same ballot to mark “Encourage,” “Discourage,” or “No opinion” for each candidate, keeping the preferences of the five permanent members hidden. After several rounds of filtering candidates through this process, the next and final phase begins, with permanent members using red ballots and non-permanent members using white ballots. Between 30 July and 15 October, five straw polls were conducted, and former Costa Rican Vice President Grynspan has emerged as a frontrunner.[6] Grynspan’s parents were Polish Jews who fled to Costa Rica during the Nazi rule; if selected, she would become the first Jewish and female Secretary-General. However, the race is still at the preliminary stages of informal opinion polling, and it remains uncertain who will win.

Table 2: The List of Candidates in the 2026 Secretary-General Race (as of 15 October 2026)

Source: Created by the author

Whoever becomes the next Secretary-General will face the task of leading the Organization amid dire financial and political constraints. In 2025, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the UN Charter, Guterres unveiled a reform package of 86 action items. This “UN80 Initiative” includes a 20% reduction in the UN budget; the elimination of 6,900 of the 35,000 Secretariat staff positions and a reduction in senior posts; the consolidation of departments and agencies working on peace and security, humanitarian assistance, development assistance, the environment, and human rights; and the relocation of UNDP (the UN Development Programme), UNICEF (the UN Children’s Fund), and UNFPA (the UN Population Fund) to Nairobi.[7] The interim report submitted in May 2026 cited the following progress.[8]

• Reduced the Secretariat’s authorized staff numbers by 21%
• Opened a hub in Valencia, Spain to support the delivery of digital services across the Secretariat
• Relocated 220 Secretariat posts out of high-cost locations such as New York and Geneva; across the UN system as a whole, roughly a further 1,900 posts were relocated
• Consolidated the humanitarian supply chain across five emergency operations (Afghanistan, Haiti, Palestine, Somalia, and Sudan)

While downsizing is underway in the Secretariat, consolidating UN agencies has proven difficult. The proposed merger of UNDP and the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) has faced fierce internal opposition, and the proposed merger of UNFPA and UN Women has raised concerns not only among civil society groups but also in Brazil, Canada, and Belgium.[9]

On the Way Forward for the Next Secretary-General

Clearly, bureaucracy that has bloated over the past 80 years—while the state of the world has changed drastically—needs transformation. However, organizational inefficiency is not the sole cause of mistrust in the UN; rather, it is the skewed nature of the intergovernmental body, which is at the mercy of the great powers. The current financial crisis facing the UN is not only the doing of the United States, which bears 22% of its regular budget, but also the result of persistent withholding or delays in annual dues by China, the second-largest contributor at 20%. Institutionally, the UN’s ability to maintain international peace and security is curtailed when permanent members of the Security Council are involved in wars, as in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. There remains no real prospect of reforming this dysfunctional Security Council structure unless its permanent members are prepared to cede or share their veto powers, which is extremely unlikely.

At the Summit of the Future, held during the General Assembly in September 2024, member states adopted the Pact for the Future, reaffirming their commitment to global governance for sustainable development, international peace, science and technology, and multilateral cooperation. No clear vision has been put forward for achieving this with the drastically downsized UN. The smaller the Organization is, the less it can take on. The UN’s main function will therefore likely shift from direct assistance to building international consensus and norms. What remains in the UN is its convening power—as an organizer that brings countries with diverse and at times conflicting needs together and guides them in resolving shared challenges through cooperation. The Secretary-General is the symbol of this shepherding role but has often been criticized for bending too much to the great powers, fueling disillusionment with the UN.[10] The single most important quality for the next Secretary-General, therefore, may well be the courage and resolve to confront, sincerely and openly, any country—a great power or not—that violates the UN Charter in the pursuit of national interest, for example, by taking military action against another country without Security Council authorization.

The UN needs to reinvent itself with a bold rethinking of its raison d’être if it is to remain relevant amid multifaceted, unprecedented challenges, from climate change to AI governance. Such innovation will not come from an organizational scrap-and-rebuild exercise; it will build on a new vision for international order that recognizes power imbalances and the far-reaching consequences of unilateral actions, especially for future generations. At the 2025 World Economic Summit, Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, called on middle powers to remain firm in anchoring international cooperation.[11] Japan, together with Canada and others, was once a champion of human security. These grand ideas that have united countries before—multilateralism, human security, and middle-power neutrality—remain as valid today as they were then. Some countries, including Japan, have a tradition of UN-centric diplomacy. The next Secretary-General should and can rekindle it, but this will require an honest conversation about what the UN is for, now that the bullying behavior of the great powers has stripped it to the bare bones. Most importantly, the conversation has to reach the public: mistrust and division that have crippled the UN prevail not only among governments but also within society. “We the peoples of the United Nations,” as the preamble of the UN Charter begins, need to own the fate of the global organization.

(2026/10/16)