--- title: "Guyana's Rodrigues Birkett leads the second straw poll to run the UN" description: "Eight candidates are competing to succeed Antonio Guterres, whose term ends on December 31. Guyana's ambassador led Friday's non-binding Security Council poll with eight encourage votes. The five permanent members can each veto, and no woman has held the job in eighty years." category: "Politics" category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/politics author: "Jasmine Howard" published: 2026-08-22T01:37:59.000Z updated: 2026-08-22T01:37:59.000Z canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/guyana-s-rodrigues-birkett-leads-the-second-straw-poll-to-run-the-un tags: ["united-nations", "diplomacy", "secretary-general", "security-council"] --- # Guyana's Rodrigues Birkett leads the second straw poll to run the UN Eight candidates are competing to succeed Antonio Guterres, whose term ends on December 31. Guyana's ambassador led Friday's non-binding Security Council poll with eight encourage votes. The five permanent members can each veto, and no woman has held the job in eighty years. Guyana's ambassador to the United Nations, Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, came top of the Security Council's second straw poll on the succession to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, [with 8 encourage votes, 3 discourage and 4 no opinion](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/22/guyanas-rodrigues-birkett-leads-informal-poll-in-race-to-be-next-un-leader). [Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica and Rafael Grossi of Argentina each took 7 encourage votes, but with different levels of opposition: Grossi drew 6 discourage votes to Grynspan's 4](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/22/guyanas-rodrigues-birkett-leads-informal-poll-in-race-to-be-next-un-leader). [Denmark's ambassador Christina Markus Lassen, who holds the council presidency for August, confirmed the result](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/22/guyanas-rodrigues-birkett-leads-informal-poll-in-race-to-be-next-un-leader). The other declared candidates are [Macky Sall of Senegal, Maria Fernanda Espinosa and Ivonne A-Baki of Ecuador, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, and Olara Otunnu of Uganda](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/22/guyanas-rodrigues-birkett-leads-informal-poll-in-race-to-be-next-un-leader), making eight in all. ## Why the discourage column is the one to watch Straw polls are non-binding and use coloured ballots on which each of the fifteen council members marks encourage, discourage or no opinion. Reading them as a leaderboard misses how they actually work. The number that decides a candidacy is not how many encourage votes it attracts but how many discourage votes it attracts, and from whom. [A candidate needs at least 9 votes in a formal vote, and any of the five permanent members can veto](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/22/guyanas-rodrigues-birkett-leads-informal-poll-in-race-to-be-next-un-leader): the United States, China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom. At this stage the ballots are indistinguishable, so nobody outside the room knows whether a discourage came from a permanent member or from an elected one. In later rounds the permanent members use differently coloured ballots, and a single discourage from that group is effectively fatal. This is why the exercise runs for months: it is a search for the candidate the great powers can all tolerate rather than the one most of them prefer. Grossi's six discourage votes are the more informative figure in Friday's result. A candidate with strong support and strong opposition is in a worse position than one with less of both. ## The two conventions in play The post has informally rotated between regions, and the two most recent secretaries-general came from Asia and then Western Europe. Latin America and the Caribbean have a strong claim on that basis, which is reflected in a field where six of the eight candidates come from the region. The second convention is one that has never been honoured. In eighty years the United Nations has had nine secretaries-general and all of them have been men, and campaigns for a woman to hold the office have run through several recent contests without success. Five of this field are women. ## What happens next [Guterres's term ends on December 31](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/22/guyanas-rodrigues-birkett-leads-informal-poll-in-race-to-be-next-un-leader). Further straw polls are expected before the Security Council makes a formal recommendation to the General Assembly, which in practice ratifies the council's choice. The job itself is weaker than the title suggests. A secretary-general has no army, no tax base and no power to compel a member state, and the office holder's influence rests on moral authority and on being acceptable to governments that disagree about almost everything. That constraint is precisely why the selection works the way it does, and why leading a straw poll in August guarantees very little. ## Sources - [Guyana's Rodrigues Birkett leads informal poll in race to be next UN leader](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/22/guyanas-rodrigues-birkett-leads-informal-poll-in-race-to-be-next-un-leader)