Competition for Grossi as UAE nominates top official to lead United Nations

The United Arab Emirates has nominated its Foreign Ministry official Lana Nusseibeh to run in the contest to lead the United Nations. 

Lana Nusseibeh is a well-regarded minister of state at the United Arab Emirates Foreign Ministry, who previously represented Abu Dhabi at the UN.

"I am standing to be Secretary-General because I believe this is a moment to act with greater urgency: to act earlier, bring people together across difference, and drive the work forward until it produces concrete results," she said in a statement.

In the latest informal straw poll held last week to gauge which candidates have a shot of becoming the next UN Secretary-General, every contender received an effective veto.

Five of the 15 members of the UN Security Council wield veto power and can shut down any candidate that is unacceptable to them, which happened Friday when all seven candidates received at least two vetoes. 

One candidate, Macky Sall of Senegal, subsequently dropped out.

That left the frontrunner Costa Rica's Rebeca Grynspan – who has been among the frontrunners in the five previous polls – running alongside Guyanese ex-foreign minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett and Argentina's Rafael Grossi, the the current head of the UN nuclear watchdog

Also in the race are Ecuador's Ivonne A-Baki and Maria Fernanda Espinosa, and Uganda's Olara Otunnu.

Outgoing secretary-general, António Guterres of Portugal, ends his second five-year term on December 31, 2026.

Even if a candidate earns the required nine votes from the 15 available in the Security Council, they must also avoid a veto by the five major powers, which are deeply divided.

Once a candidate clears those bars, their name will go to the General Assembly of all UN members for confirmation.

The Security Council straw poll was devised in the early 1980s in an attempt to break a deadlock between two candidates shut down by vetoes.

The informal mechanism has persisted, in various forms, despite criticism from countries opposed to the opaque process.

Each of the 15 Security Council members must anonymously assign each candidate one of three labels: "encourage," "discourage," or "no opinion." 

It is tradition that the UN's top job should rotate between different regions.

Under that premise, the role should go to a candidate from Latin America this time.