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An Insider's View: The Next UN Secretary-General

Eurasia Live
23 September 2016
UNITED NATIONS
AN insider's view:
the next un secretary-general
Nine candidates are still in the running to become the next UN Secretary-General. Beneath all the smoke and mirrors of the selection process, who are the real front runners?

Eurasia Group's newest senior advisor, former UN Deputy Secretay-General Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, discusses the top candidates with Deputy CEO Sean West.

Full transcript below. 

Sean West: You were Deputy Secretary-General of the UN and there is a heated race for the seat at the top of the organization. What's at stake and who do you think is going to win?

Lord Mark Malloch-Brown: Well, in a strange way, behind the heat and sawdust and gunpowder, a group of originally 12, now nine candidates, going at each other through a series of straw poll votes, a pattern is emerging that quality is coming to the top.

The leader from the first poll onwards is a really impressive former Portuguese Prime Minister and long-term head of the UN High Commission for Refugees, António Guterres. If he doesn't make it and there are a lot of rumors he won't, because he may run into a Russian or other veto, then waiting in the sidelines, not one of those current nine candidates, is Kristalina Georgieva of the European Union with a long background in international relations, both there and at the World Bank before that, who everybody expects to jump in if Guterres falters. And so even though it seemed to be a race to the bottom, the choice that seems to be emerging are two individuals, either of whom would fill the office of Secretary-General with considerable stature.
 
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