The U.N. Security Council has held its first ballot to trim down the 12 candidates vying to be U.N.’s next Secretary-General. Incumbent Ban Ki-moon will step down at the end of this year. The results of the informal poll will not be made public.
The U.N. has been using so-called “straw polls” as part of the selection process for Secretary General since 1981; the idea is to work out how viable each candidate is before a formal ballot is held, as the president of the Security Council said Thursday when he informed reporters that the poll had taken place.
“Straw poll is an indicative word. It is to inform the candidates of where they stand in the race, it is to inform the SC members how the race might go on from here. From that point of view, I think the straw poll that we just had, it went smoothly and I think it was a useful procedure,” said Koro Bessho, acting president of U.N. Security Council.
The 15 security council members have voted on whether to “encourage,” “discourage” or have “no opinion” on each of the 12 candidates for the job. They did so behind closed doors, and no record was taken.
At this stage, the votes of the five permanent members and the other elected members are indistinguishable; in later straw polls, they may use different coloured ballot papers to tell them apart.
The nominating states for each contender will now have been told how their candidate did—and what the highest and lowest scores were overall, but not who got them. But those results are not released to the public. Now it is up to the candidates to decide whether or not to drop out and narrow the field.
There is likely to be several straw polls before an official ballot takes place—and once the Security Council arrives at a consensus, that name will be sent to the General Assembly for a vote there. And that has all got to be done in plenty of time to allow a handover period before Ban Ki-moon finishes his term at the end of this year.