The United Nations is choosing its next Secretary-General at perhaps the most precarious moment in its history. The process tells us something uncomfortable about the institution the successful candidate will inherit: the UN has learned to let people watch, but not yet to let them participate.
This week, world leaders descend on New York for the United Nations General Assembly. In corridors, receptions and closed meeting rooms, one question will hang over almost every conversation: who will be the next Secretary-General of the United Nations?
The more important question, however, is “Why do the world's eight billion people have no say in the answer?”
The formal process is straightforward. Governments nominate candidates. Candidates publish vision statements and CVs and appear before the General Assembly. Then the fifteen members of the Security Council hold a series of (officially) secret "straw polls", voting in favour, against or abstaining. To gain a formal recommendation of the UNSC, a candidate needs 9 votes in favour. Eventually, the Council recommends one name to the General Assembly, which appoints the Secretary-General.
But there is a catch. Any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — can veto a candidate. By the time the name reaches the General Assembly, the real choice has already been made.
In other words, the leader charged with representing all of us, peoples of the United Nations, is selected through closed-door negotiations dominated by five governments. That system belongs to another century.
Transparency without power
To its credit, the UN has tried to open the process. Since 2016, candidates publish vision statements and now, for the first time, also campaign-financing disclosures. They have faced public interactive dialogues in the General Assembly, where civil society has been able to submit questions.
This year even brought a televised "UN Town Hall", gathering the candidates in the General Assembly Hall before the Security Council began its straw polls in July. The UN described it as an important advance in transparency, accountability and public engagement.
But we should not confuse watching a selection process with participating in one. The Town Hall gave the public a window into the race. It did not give people any meaningful influence over its outcome. Neither do the interactive dialogues.
Once the public-facing part of the process finishes, the doors close again and the decisive bargaining moves to the Security Council. Transparency and consultations are valuable, but they are not the same as democracy.
The UN is fighting for its future
The next Secretary-General will not inherit a comfortable institution in need of minor modernisation. They will inherit a United Nations fighting for its relevance — and its existence.
The financial situation alone is extraordinarily dire. Assessed-contribution arrears to the UN Secretariat almost doubled from $3.4 billion in 2022 to $6.6 billion by April this year. Core funding across the UN system is declining. Staffing has been cut. Peacekeeping operations have been halted due to the financial constraints. This summer, the General Assembly had to change a 75-year-old financial rule to avert what its President called the imminent financial collapse of the organisation.
At the same time, the UN80 reform process is asking fundamental questions about what the institution does, what it can afford to do and how it should be structured.
And all of this is happening while the problems requiring global cooperation are becoming more, not less, existential: climate breakdown, war, artificial intelligence, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, inequality and democratic decline. This is an explosive combination.
Informal, ad-hoc forums of global governance are stepping up to fill the vacuum. But they present serious practical and moral issues. Earlier this year, Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" offered one particularly bleak vision. Its model concentrates extraordinary authority in its chairman (Mr. Trump personally) and allows states to buy a seat at the table by making a billion-dollar contribution. It presents force and money as substitutes for diplomacy and cooperation. This is exactly the wrong lesson to draw from the UN's failures.
The choice is not between an ineffective multilateral system and an efficient club of powerful states and wealthy interests. Global governance can be made faster and more effective. But efficiency cannot come at the expense of legitimacy.
It’s good to remind ourselves that the UN remains a trusted and respected institution to most of the world’s citizens, but one that is too far from the people it serves. The challenge lies in bringing decisions closer to the people who must live with their consequences.
Citizen participation is no longer a nice-to-have
For decades, citizen participation in global governance has been treated as something peripheral: invite civil society to a consultation, livestream a meeting, hold a stakeholder dialogue. That is no longer enough.
As we face increasingly daunting global problems, people are and will be asked to accept far-reaching decisions on climate, conflict, migration, technology, health and economic. Yet the democratic mechanisms available to them remain overwhelmingly national. If we take into account that less than half of the Member States of the UN can be considered democracies, this presents an enormous problem.
There is no democratic infrastructure connecting ordinary citizens directly to global decision-making. That gap is dangerous. If people experience international institutions as distant places where governments negotiate rules behind closed doors, defending those institutions becomes untenable. And when multilateral institutions lose public legitimacy, the vacuum will not necessarily be filled by something more democratic. The Board of Peace shows the way already: international governance based on money, power and personal connections.
This is why citizen participation is not icing on the cake of multilateralism. It is part of its survival kit.
There are concrete ways to begin:
A UN World Citizens' Initiative could allow people across countries to place an issue formally on the UN agenda. A UN Parliamentary Assembly could introduce a representative democratic dimension alongside governments. A UN Civil Society Envoy could create a permanent institutional bridge between the UN system and organised civil society. Citizens' assemblies and deliberative processes could bring ordinary people directly into debates about questions whose consequences cross national borders.
None of these ideas would replace Member States. They would complement them.
They simply start from a principle that should not be radical in 2026: people affected by decisions deserve meaningful opportunities to influence them.
So what do the candidates say?
We examined the candidates' public positions against five questions: their commitment to open global governance; their proposals for citizen participation; their openness to civil society; their ambition for UN reform; and their democratic track record. There is much to welcome: Rebeca Grynspan presents an unusually strong case for transparency, accountability and civil-society partnership. María Fernanda Espinosa speaks compellingly about meaningful participation and inclusive global governance. Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett emphasises a people-centred United Nations. Olara Otunnu talks of connecting "the Global" with "the Community". Ivonne A-Baki proposes ambitious structural reforms to the UN itself.
But across the field, one gap is striking.
Candidates repeatedly promise to listen to people. To consult civil society. To engage youth. To make the UN more people-centred.Very few explain how people might actually acquire power.
Where is the right of citizens to put an issue on the UN agenda? Where are permanent mechanisms for citizen deliberation? Where is democratic representation beyond governments? Where is the commitment to ensuring that civil society participation does not depend on the goodwill of Member States? The next Secretary-General should answer those questions.
And yes, it is time for a woman
There is another fact about this selection that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore: In more than eighty years, the United Nations has never had a woman Secretary-General.
No one should become Secretary-General because she is a woman. The job is too important for that. But look at the women who have put themselves forward: Former vice-presidents, foreign ministers, presidents of the General Assembly, senior UN leaders, diplomats and international negotiators. Women with decades of experience navigating development, diplomacy, multilateral institutions and political leadership.
Then consider what the existing system is prepared to overlook elsewhere.
One male candidate has continued to lead a major international agency while campaigning for the Secretary-Generalship, despite obvious questions about the separation between institutional responsibilities and political campaigning. Another brings a domestic record that includes serious concerns over restrictions on opposition, protest and civic space, as well as an attempt to postpone a presidential election that was overturned by his country's Constitutional Council.
We are past asking if the world is "ready" for a woman Secretary-General. But electing the first woman Secretary-General cannot mean handing her an institution on the verge of collapse. We can’t congratulate ourselves for breaking a glass ceiling just as we push her off a glass cliff.
She — whoever she may be — must be given the political space, resources and mandate to lead genuine reform. And genuine reform cannot mean only doing the same things with fewer staff and less money. This is the Member States’ urgent responsibility – especially that of the democratic ones and the so-called “Middle powers”.
Who is the people's candidate?
So let’s stop asking the wrong question during High-Level Week.
It’s not about which candidate Washington supports, whom Moscow might veto. It’s not a global popularity contest. We should ask: Who is the people's candidate?
Who is willing to say that the legitimacy of the United Nations cannot rest indefinitely on diplomatic negotiations among governments alone? Who understands that opening a Town Hall is a beginning, not an achievement? And who is prepared to give citizens something more consequential than a microphone for ninety minutes every ten years?
The United Nations was created in the name of "We the Peoples".
Eighty-one years later, perhaps it is finally time to let the people in.
