On Thursday 30 July, the UN Security Council conducted its first ‘straw poll’, indicating the level of support for each Secretary-General candidate.
Each of the 15 members of the Security Council vote ‘encourage’, ‘discourage’ or ‘no opinion’ on their ballot for the candidates. At this stage, the votes of the Permanent Five veto-holding members of the council have not been differentiated from those of the other elected members.
Rebeca Grynspan received the highest number of “encourage” votes (10), followed by Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett (9) and Rafael Grossi (7).
Several rounds of this informal voting mechanism are expected to be carried out to determine the candidate that the Council will recommend to the General Assembly–we’ll be updating our straw polls page after each vote.
As in the 2016 process, the straw poll result was not publicly released, however the results have been leaked online. There also remains considerable frustration among the wider UN membership that no similar deliberative process exists for the General Assembly. In the lead up to the 2026 selection, most member states supported the notion of the PGA conducting straw poll votes by secret ballot (or a similar method) to determine the GA’s favorite candidates. However this measure was not included in the final 2025 resolution on the Revitalization of the General Assembly.
You can find out more about how the Security Council straw polls work in our Ultimate Guide to the Selection Process.
This first vote took place shortly after the nomination of a seventh candidate, Olara Otunnu, by Uganda on 24 July. Otunnu was included in the poll despite not yet appearing before the General Assembly as the other candidates have done. 1 for 8 Billion sent a letter to the Presidents of the General Assembly and Security Council calling for all candidates to be subject to the same process, warning of the erosion of credibility and the risk of leaving the door open for possible future last minute candidates to evade scrutiny and accountability.
Banner image: illustration by Bruna Barretto.