Last-Minute Candidate Makes a Mockery of Efforts to Open Up UN Leadership Race

Democracy International calls for equal public scrutiny of Lana Nusseibeh or any other late entrant, and democratic reform of UN decision-making.

Bringing Lana Nusseibeh, Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, in as a last-minute candidate in the race for United Nations Secretary-General without subjecting her to the same public scrutiny as existing candidates makes a mockery of efforts to make the selection process more transparent, Democracy International said today.

The United Arab Emirates announced Nusseibeh’s candidacy yesterday, and the next UN Security Council vote on the nomination of the Secretary-General has been postponed to allow Nusseibeh to pose her candidacy officially. 

Candidates in the current race have published vision statements and campaign-financing disclosures and faced hours of public questioning by Member States and civil society. Candidates nominated in time also participated in the first UN Secretary-General Town Hall in a decade. They have responded to civil society requests about their positions.

The UN General Assembly has gone to considerable lengths to open up a process that was historically conducted almost entirely behind closed doors. Even candidates nominated shortly before the first two Security Council straw polls were required to face public interactive dialogues. The then-President of the General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock, explicitly encouraged the Security Council to consider only candidates who had first participated in such a dialogue.

Yet after six secret Security Council straw polls - the anonymous vote that leads to appointment - showed mounting opposition, including by Permanent Members of the Security Council, to all the candidates, governments decided to bring a new in the game.

“You cannot spend months asking candidates to disclose their finances, publish their plans and answer questions in public, only to discard that process when powerful governments cannot agree on the result,” said Caroline Vernaillen of Democracy International. “If Member States want to nominate someone new, that person must face exactly the same public scrutiny as everyone else.”

The stakes could hardly be higher. The next Secretary-General will inherit a United Nations under severe financial pressure while confronting wars, climate breakdown, rapidly developing artificial intelligence, nuclear risks and deep geopolitical divisions. Few Secretaries-General in recent history will have taken office at a more consequential moment.

But the democratic deficit goes deeper than the selection process itself.

The UN Charter begins with “We the Peoples”, yet citizens are represented at the United Nations almost entirely through their governments. According to democracy researchers, only 103 of the UN’s 193 Member States — 53% — are classified as democracies*. V-Dem estimates that 74% of humanity now lives under autocratic rule.

This means that for billions of people, their government has a seat and a vote at the United Nations, while they do not. So who represents them?

This is why Democracy International and its partners in the We the Peoples campaign advocate three concrete reforms: a UN World Citizens’ Initiative, allowing citizens to put issues onto the UN agenda when sufficient support is gathered across countries; a UN Parliamentary Assembly, giving elected representatives a direct role at the global level; and a UN Civil Society Envoy, strengthening the institutional voice of civil society within the United Nations.

These reforms would begin to give meaning to the opening words of the UN Charter by creating channels for representation and participation that do not depend entirely on governments.

The selection of the Secretary-General illustrates the problem particularly starkly. The 15 members of the Security Council assess candidates through secret straw polls marked “encourage”, “discourage” or “no opinion”. The results are not officially published. In the initial rounds, it is not even possible to tell whether opposition to a candidate comes from an elected Council member or from one of the five permanent members, who are flat-out capable of blocking their selection.

“Anonymous ballots, secret deliberations and geopolitical horse-trading belong in a feudal court, not in the selection of the person expected to represent eight billion people,” said Caroline Vernaillen. “The current crisis of the United Nations is more than one of finances alone, it is also one of legitimacy. The UN needs a clearly defined process to select the Secretary-General; with nomination deadlines, open deliberations, transparent votes and ultimately a say for all of us, who will be represented by them.”

Democracy International calls on all Member States to ensure that Lana Nusseibeh or any other additional candidate undergoes the same transparency requirements and public scrutiny as candidates already in the race before being considered in further Security Council straw polls.

* Democracy International calculation based on the 2025 country classifications in V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2026 and the Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED). V-Dem provides regime classifications for 172 of the UN’s 193 Member States. For the 21 Member States not covered by V-Dem, primarily small states and microstates, the latest LIED classifications are used to complete the dataset. On this basis, 103 of the UN’s 193 Member States are classified as democracies. Because the two indices use different methodologies, this figure should be understood as a cross-dataset estimate rather than a classification published by either index.