UAE diplomat enters race for UN secretary-general as Security Council deadlock drags on

The United Arab Emirates formally entered a candidate into the race to become the next secretary-general of the United Nations this week, adding a seventh contender to a field that has failed, through six rounds of secret Security Council balloting, to produce a consensus successor to António Guterres.

President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan nominated Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, the UAE's minister of state for foreign affairs and a former ambassador to the UN, in a letter sent Wednesday to the presidents of the General Assembly and the Security Council. The nomination was lodged through the UN's own candidate-tracking system, which now lists her alongside six other sitting candidates on the organization's official selection and appointment page.

A late entry into a crowded field

Nusseibeh's candidacy arrived a day after former Senegalese president Macky Sall, who had been nominated by Burundi, withdrew from the race on October 20. That leaves seven active candidates on the UN's roster: Rafael Mariano Grossi of Argentina, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency; Rebeca Grynspan Mayufis of Costa Rica, the UN trade and development chief; Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett of Guyana; María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador; Olara Otunnu of Uganda; Ivonne A-Baki of Ecuador; and now Nusseibeh. Two earlier candidates, Chile's Michelle Bachelet and Argentina's Virginia Gamba, withdrew in September and March, respectively.

Under the process set out in the joint letter notifying member states of her candidacy, Nusseibeh has also filed the vision statement, CV and campaign-financing disclosure required of every contender. In that statement, she wrote that she is "standing to be Secretary General because I believe this is a moment to act with greater urgency," warning that "when the distance between what we promise and what we deliver grows, trust erodes, and so does our ability to act."

"I offer myself to this office as I would serve it: speaking frankly with every government and answering to none."

Six polls, no consensus

The Security Council has run six informal "straw polls" since July 30 to gauge support for the field, using color-coded ballots that let the five permanent, veto-wielding members — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — register "encourage," "discourage" or "no opinion" separately from the ten rotating members. A candidate needs backing from at least nine of the council's 15 members and no opposition from any of the five permanent ones to be recommended to the full 193-member General Assembly.

Reporting on the most recent poll, held October 16, said Grynspan again placed first with roughly nine "encourage" votes but drew opposition from two permanent members, as did every other candidate on the ballot — a result that effectively left the contest deadlocked for a sixth straight time, according to Reuters' reporting on diplomats' accounts of the vote. The council does not release straw-poll results officially, so vote totals circulate through diplomats speaking to reporters rather than through any published tally.

The selection is governed by General Assembly resolution 79/327, adopted in September 2025, which set out a more transparent process than past searches for a secretary-general: nominees must submit written vision statements and disclose campaign funding, and candidates face open question-and-answer sessions with member states, including a town hall held in the General Assembly Hall in July. Guterres's second five-year term ends December 31, and his successor is due to take office January 1, 2027.

A career built inside the UN

Nusseibeh, who is of Palestinian and British-Emirati heritage, served as the UAE's first woman permanent representative to the UN from 2013 until stepping down in 2024, a tenure that included two terms as rotating president of the Security Council during the UAE's 2022-2023 elected term on the council. She left that post to become minister of state at the Foreign Ministry, where she has focused on multilateral diplomacy. If selected, she would become the first woman to lead the UN and only the second Arab secretary-general, after Egypt's Boutros Boutros-Ghali led the organization from 1992 to 1996.

Brett McGurk, a former senior US official who worked opposite Nusseibeh during her time at the UN, was quoted in The National's report on her candidacy calling her a diplomat who "knows everyone and works with them" and "an inspired choice for this impossible job." The UAE's state news agency, in the president's nomination letter, cited her "deep experience of the United Nations" and "record of constructive work" — background consistent with the agency's own account of her decade-long UN posting when it ended in 2024.

Who is watching, and what comes next

The outcome matters most immediately to the roughly 193 UN member states whose representatives will eventually vote on a General Assembly resolution appointing whoever the Security Council recommends, and to the tens of thousands of UN staff and agency heads awaiting direction on budget cuts and mandate reviews that have stalled pending new leadership. It also matters to the other six candidates, several of whom have campaigned for more than a year through dialogues, disclosures and now repeated straw polls without a breakthrough.

Analysts quoted in Al-Monitor's analysis of the nomination noted that the UAE's close ties to Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London and Paris alike could make Nusseibeh more palatable to all five permanent members than rivals who have drawn at least one veto-wielding objector apiece — though they cautioned she would also have to answer for the UAE's own interventions in regional conflicts, including in Sudan and Libya, during any confirmation process. The Trump administration has said publicly, through deputy UN ambassador Dorothy Shea, that it wants a merit-based process open to candidates "from any region," without naming a preferred contender.

The Security Council gives no fixed date for a seventh straw poll, though diplomats cited by multiple outlets expect council members to test Nusseibeh's support in a new round of balloting within weeks. With barely ten weeks left before Guterres's term expires, the council has little room left to keep running polls that produce no winner.