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GROSSI FOR UN SECRETARY-GENERAL: A COMPELLING CASE
Dear Editor,
Vishnu Bisram’s piece in today’s Kaieteur News on the UN Secretary-General selection prompted me to briefly weigh in on the two strongest candidates: Rafael Grossi of Argentina and Michelle Bachelet of Chile.
Grossi is the candidate to beat. At 64, he possesses what multilateral diplomacy rarely produces — genuine cross-regional legitimacy, bridging Latin America and Europe with endorsements from Paraguay and Italy. More critically, he likely carries Washington’s confidence under the Trump administration. In any realistic accounting of how a Secretary-General gets confirmed through the Security Council, American backing is not one variable among many. It is the decisive one.
Six years leading the International Atomic Energy Agency — 181 member states, responsible for nuclear safeguards and preventing military misuse of nuclear technology — has given Grossi principal-level working relationships with all 5 permanent Security Council members. His personal leadership of inspection missions to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant during active hostilities in Ukraine demonstrated exactly the institutional courage and operational credibility the Secretary-General’s office demands in an era of genuine global crisis across all three UN pillars: peace and security, development, and human rights.
Bachelet, at 74, brings distinction as Chile’s first female president, former Defence Minister, and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. However, a changed Chilean government has weakened her domestic institutional base, and her documented sympathies with the Castro government introduce friction in precisely the Western Hemisphere corridors where she might otherwise have been strongest.
Grossi’s critics characterise his instinct for institutional continuity as timidity. The more accurate reading is strategic prudence — in an era of fracturing multilateralism, a Secretary-General who commands competing great powers’ confidence without trailing ideological baggage is exactly what the United Nations needs to remain functional.
Grossi is the most electable candidate.
Regards,
M. Shabeer Zafar, barrister
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