Former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan widened her lead in the race to become the 10th secretary-general of the United Nations on Friday, October 30, 2026, after the Security Council’s seventh informal straw poll gave her 11 votes in favour and 4 against, with no member recording no opinion. The result, described by two people close to the process, was her strongest showing across seven closed-door ballots held in recent months to choose a successor to Antonio Guterres, who finishes his second five-year term this year. The figures are unofficial and were not published by the United Nations itself, but they offer the clearest public signal yet of where the 15-member Council stands.
Grynspan has led the field in earlier rounds as well, yet diplomats caution that a lead in an informal poll is a long way from a nomination. The ballots are anonymous, they carry no legal force, and the candidate who eventually wins must survive a test that no straw poll on its own can settle: the approval, or at least the acquiescence, of all five of the Council’s permanent members. Friday’s result therefore matters less as a verdict than as a snapshot of momentum, and momentum in this contest has shifted before.
How the UN secretary-general race moves from straw polls to a decision
The selection process has two stages, and the straw polls belong firmly to the first. In each round, Council members mark every candidate as encourage, discourage or no opinion, giving the Council a private sense of who could command broad support and who is blocked. To be formally recommended, a candidate needs at least nine positive votes and no discourage vote from any of the five permanent members, France, Britain, the United States, Russia and China. The General Assembly then appoints the secretary-general on the Council’s recommendation, a step that is normally a formality once the Council has agreed, but which underlines that the job belongs to the whole 193-member organisation, not only to the Council.
Friday’s ballot was not coded in a way that would allow observers to work out how the permanent members voted, which limits what can be read into the headline numbers. In earlier colour-coded rounds, different coloured ballot papers for permanent and elected members made it possible to see whether a discourage vote came from a country with a veto. Reporting on an earlier colour-coded round indicated that leading candidates still carried discourage votes from permanent members, a reminder that 11 encourage votes do not guarantee success if one of the four discourage votes against Grynspan came from a permanent member. The next colour-coded round, when it comes, will therefore be watched more closely than the raw totals suggest.
The rest of the field after the seventh ballot
Behind Grynspan, Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, moved into second place with 9 votes in favour, 4 against and 2 marked as no opinion, the first time he has reached nine encourage votes in this race. Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana followed with 8 in favour, 6 against and 1 no opinion, holding the position she has occupied in recent rounds. The United Arab Emirates diplomat Lana Nusseibeh, a former ambassador to the United Nations, recorded 7 in favour, 6 against and 2 no opinion in her first poll since entering the race, placing fourth.
Nusseibeh’s entry was one of the more closely watched developments of this round. She joined the contest late, after six rounds had failed to produce a consensus candidate, and late entrants in such races are often assumed to have sounded out the permanent members before declaring. A fourth-place debut, taking support from none of the three frontrunners in any decisive way, suggests she has work to do to become a compromise choice rather than an additional contender. The remaining candidates trailed further behind, and the field also includes former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, Ecuador’s Maria Fernanda Espinosa and Ivonne Baki, and Uganda’s Olara Otunnu, each of whom has struggled to build a broad base across the Council’s regional and political divides.
Who Rebeca Grynspan is, and why she leads
Grynspan brings a profile that spans national government and the United Nations system. She served as vice president of Costa Rica and now heads the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, a role that has put her at the centre of debates about development finance, trade and the economic pressures facing poorer countries. Supporters present that combination as well suited to a secretary-general who must speak for the wider membership, not only for the great powers, while critics in any such race tend to test whether a frontrunner can also manage the organisation’s political crises and its relationship with Washington.
Her trajectory through the autumn rounds helps explain why Friday’s result drew attention. Reporting on earlier ballots showed her support building steadily, from 10 encourage votes in a late-September round to 11 now, while her discourage votes fell to four, her lowest of the race. That direction of travel matters in a process designed to weed out candidates gradually: contenders who keep losing ground tend to withdraw, while those who keep gaining attract the attention of delegations looking for a winner. Even so, Grynspan’s advisers and supporters know that earlier frontrunners in past secretary-general races have stumbled at the final hurdle, when a single permanent member’s objection can end a candidacy that looked unstoppable.
The challenges facing Antonio Guterres’s successor
Whoever takes over from Guterres will inherit an organisation under strain from several directions at once. Multiple wars are on the Council’s agenda, from Ukraine to the Middle East, and the Council itself is frequently divided along the same lines as the conflicts it is meant to address. At the same time, cutbacks in American contributions to the United Nations have squeezed budgets, and Washington has pulled out of dozens of UN agencies, raising questions about funding for peacekeeping, humanitarian work and development programmes that millions of people rely on.
Beyond money, the next secretary-general will face a deeper question about relevance. The 193-member body was built to give every state a voice and to provide a forum where even adversaries keep talking, but when the great powers disagree, the Council can deadlock and action shifts elsewhere, to regional groups, coalitions of willing states or bilateral deals. A secretary-general cannot force the permanent members to agree, but can shape the agenda, mediate quietly, deploy envoys, and use the moral authority of the office to keep issues in public view. How the next holder of the office balances those tools, and how far they are willing to challenge powerful members in public, will define their tenure as much as any single crisis.
The Assembly’s own dynamics add another layer. The General Assembly, which must ultimately appoint the Council’s nominee, has shown in recent years that it can deliver lopsided majorities on divisive questions, including when it repeatedly backed ending the Cuba embargo. That breadth of support does not decide the secretary-general’s race, where the Council’s recommendation comes first, but it is a reminder that the next secretary-general will answer to a membership whose views are often far more united than the Council’s own.
What happens next
No date has been set publicly for a formal recommendation, and the Council is expected to keep consulting, and possibly to hold further straw polls, until a candidate emerges who can clear the nine-vote threshold without a permanent-member veto. Candidates who see no path forward may withdraw, new names could still enter, and the balance could shift again if a colour-coded round exposes a veto that an uncoloured ballot concealed. For now, Grynspan enters the next phase as the clear frontrunner, Grossi has fresh momentum in second, and Nusseibeh has a first result to build on. None of that amounts to a decision, and in a contest conducted behind closed doors, the most important conversations of the coming weeks will be the ones the public never hears.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters, The National and Inner City Press.