The 18 September UNSC Straw Poll for the selection of Antonio Guterres’s successor opens the race wide as an African’s chance as a consensus candidate grows

The 18 September UNSC Straw Poll for the selection of Antonio Guterres’s successor opens the race wide as an African’s chance as a consensus candidate growsDate | 20 September 2026

Solomon Ayele Dersso, PhD, Founding Director, Amani Africa

As the time for the end of the term of Antonio Guterres, the outgoing Secretary-General of the UN, fast approaches, the process for the selection of his successor grinds on at a rather slow pace. On 18 September, the UN Security Council (UNSC) held the third straw poll on the current list of candidates.

The outcome of the poll suggests that none of the current candidates won the requisite level of confidence of the UNSC. However, the poll was significant from the perspective of clarifying some questions about the standing and prospects of the current list of candidates in the selection process and the trajectory of the selection process.

The result of the 18 September poll, assembled by various sources, put Rebeca Grynspan, former Costa Rican Vice President, back at the top of the ranking. She is the only candidate who gained votes in this round of the poll. She added two votes on top of the seven votes she secured during the second straw poll held on 21 August. However, despite putting her in the lead position, Grynspan’s gain does not represent a full recovery of the loss she suffered during the second poll. After starting off with the only double-digit encourage vote since the first straw poll of 30 July, she lost three votes, while the number of UNSC members that cast the ‘no opinion’ vote on her during the first and second straw polls remained the same at 4. During the third poll, Grysnpan turned two of the ‘no opinion’ votes from the earlier rounds into encourage votes. This suggests that she did not regain the votes she lost during the earlier round.

Unless she suffers a loss during the upcoming poll from the number of encourage votes she received, the fact that Grynspan is in the lead position with nine votes means that she has the required number of UNSC votes to be recommended to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) provided that she receives no discourage vote from any of the five permanent members of the UNSC. Indeed, at this point she is the only candidate who meets the nine-vote threshold of the UNSC and remains the only one to have achieved this twice during the three straw polls the UNSC held so far. If she turns the one ‘no opinion’ vote she received during the 18 September poll or succeeds in reversing any number of the ‘discourage’ votes, she could secure double-digit positive votes.

While this makes her the strongest of the candidates, it does not make her a definitive front-runner. As Pass Blue reported, quoting sources, ‘two of Grynspan’s five discourage votes could have come from China and Russia.’

Carolyn Rodrigus Brikett, Guyana’s Permanent Representative to the UN and former Foreign Minister, who polled first during the second poll, went back to second place during the 18 September poll. Unlike Gryspan, Brikett did not manage to change any of the four ‘no opinion’ votes she got during the first and second straw polls into any encouraging vote.  However, Brikett, who outperformed all the candidates by huge margins during the UNGA Town Hall,   retained the number of votes that put her in the lead position during the 21 August UNSC poll. This accounts for the fact that she remains to be among the top two of the candidates currently in the race. As things stand, the eight votes she received during the 18 September poll as in the 21 August poll, means that she is short of one vote for meeting the UNSC threshold of nine encourage votes required to have any chance of progress in the UNSC selection process. Given that there is still one ‘no opinion’ vote she received during the third poll, she could meet this threshold if she succeeds in turning this vote into ‘encourage’ or reversing any number of the ‘discourage’ votes she received.

In an intriguing turn of events, the candidate that polled third from the 18 September poll is Olara Otunnu, former Ugandan foreign minister and member of the UN Security Council, one of the two African candidates who are the latest of the two late entrants into the race. Otunnu’s ascendance to third place is owing to the fact that he retained the number five ‘encourage votes’ that he had from the previous round. While retaining the votes from the previous poll served Brikett to remain one of the top two candidates, it became an asset that helped Otunnu ascend in the ranking of candidates.

What is interesting about Otunnu’s rise in the ranking of candidates from the third poll is that he has become the candidate who now has for the first time a shot at the position of the Secretary-General. There are three necessary conditions that would open a pathway for this African candidate to become the next Secretary-General of the UN. The first condition is the receipt by the two front-runners of a ‘discourage’ vote from any of the Permanent Members of the UNSC. My hope is that either receives no such ‘discourage’ vote or a new woman candidate that secures stronger support of the UNSC including no ‘discourage’ vote from the Permanent Members of the UNSC for the historic appointment of the first woman Secretary-General to materialise. The second condition is the absence of any new entrant to the race that would command a higher level of confidence of the members of the UNSC than any of the current candidates. Third, Otunnu himself should not receive any ‘discourage’ vote from any of the UNSC Permanent Members.

In the event of all these three conditions materialising, Otunnu may come out to be a consensus candidate to win the race and become the next Secretary-General. That it produced this possibility is one of the few interesting aspects that makes the 18 September poll remarkable and Otunnu’s improved fortune intriguing. Needless to say, for this possibility to become viable Otunnu needs to turn the current three ‘no opinion’ votes on him into ‘encourage’ votes and succeeds in reversing additional one or more ‘discourage’ votes to meet the UNSC threshold of having nine positive votes to pass to the next stage.

It will not be completely off mark to suggest, from the 18 September poll, that the rest of the candidates find themselves at various levels of looking to the exit from the race. All these remaining candidates, namely Rafael Grossi, the Argentinean and current Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Macky Sall, Senegal’s former President, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, the Ecuadorian former UNGA President, Michelle Bachelet, former two-time President of Chile, and Ivonne A-Baki, the last entrant to the race and a former Ecuadorian minister, suffered a loss in the number of ‘encourage’ votes they received from their previous performance. Grossi, who held the third position during the previous rounds, lost two encourage votes from the seven he had during the last two polls. Sall lost one ‘encourage vote’ from the six he garnered during the last two polls. Espinosa lost as much as Sall, but she lost two votes from the second and third polls. While Bachelet too lost one vote during the 18 September poll, she lost a total of five votes since the six votes she secured during the first poll on 30 July. With no ‘encourage vote, Baki, once again, polled last since her entrance to the race.

One of the most notable statistics of the 18 September poll is the fact that all the candidates received more ‘discourage’ vote than the previous polls. As the foregoing analysis shows, it is the combination of the receipt of more ‘discourage’ votes than the previous poll and the retention or loss of ‘encourage’ votes that stands to decide those who continue to have a prospect of success from those whose chances have hugely diminished. For some like Baki and Bachelet, all the indications are that 18 September marked the end of their race. Despite faring better, Sall and Grossi, who have nine and eight discourage votes respectively after receiving two more ‘discourage’ votes in addition to the loss in their ‘encourage’ votes, are at the end of the race too.

It is the fact that all of these candidates who lost ‘encourage’ votes, along with receiving further ‘discourage’ votes, that makes the 18 September poll a turning point in terms of paving the way for the entrance of new candidates into the race. In terms of the standing of the current eight candidates, the upshot of the foregoing analysis on the 18 September poll is that only three of them have prospect of success, albeit to varying degrees. In that sense and depending on the level of support that new entrant/s garner from the UNSC, the 18 September poll has left the race for selecting Guterres’s successor wide open.