Antonio Guterres of Portugal poised to become next UN Secretary-General after secret vote

Hopes that the UN would appoint its first woman Secretary-General are dashed

Antonio Guterres speaks to reporters at the UN headquarters in New York in April (Getty)

Antonio Guterres, the former Prime Minister of Portugal, is poised to be the next Secretary-General of the United Nations, succeeding Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea who has served two four-year terms.

Mr Guterres, who was head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees for ten years until retirement last December, beat out a field of ten rivals, including Helen Clarke, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand.

His path to the 38th floor of UN headquarters in New York was affirmed on Wednesday morning when the 15-member UN Security Council held the most recent of a long succession of informal ballots on who should be the next diplomat-in-chief for the world.

While previous straw polls had shown at least two countries expressing doubts about Mr Guterres, who is 67, the support for him on Wednesday was unanimous. That meant that any of the five countries with permanent seats who may have blocked him with a veto desisted from doing so.

It now only remains for the Council to formally approve his nomination with a resolution which it would then forward to the UN General Assembly, on which all member states of the UN sit, for its approval. There was no sign that that process would encounter any hiccups, however, suggesting that Mr Guterres will indeed soon be declared Secretary-General-elect.

His appointment will be welcomed by many in the UN family, who widely viewed him as an effective leader of the UNCHR, introducing a range of important reforms to the agency over his ten-year tenure and ensuring that more funds went directly to aiding those forced from their lands.

But it will be a disappointment to those who had been lobbying hard this year for the UN to show an example and choose a woman to head the world body for the first time. There had also been some expectation, notably from Russia, that the new Secretary-General should have been someone from Eastern Europe, a region that has not had someone in the post before.

If Mr Guterres had stumbled at the last hurdle it would have been because of Russian opposition. But in the end that did not transpire, sparing the Security Council of a long battle over filling the post, which could have pitted the Washington against Moscow at a time of already heightened tensions between them.

“Today after our sixth straw poll we have a clear favourite and his name is Antonio Guterres,” Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters with his 14 council colleagues standing behind him.“We have decided to go to a formal vote tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock, and we hope it can be done by acclamation,” said Mr Churkin, who is council president for October.