Emirati diplomat Lana Nusseibeh has thanked Cyprus and Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos for his and its support for her campaign to be named the United Nations’ new secretary-general when incumbent Antonio Guterres retires at the end of the year.
“Thank you, Foreign Minister Kombos and Cyprus, for your support. Dialogue and compromise are not ends in themselves. They matter because they can produce practical results. That is the kind of active diplomacy I could bring to the office of secretary-general,” she said.
Nusseibeh was put forward for the role last Wednesday after a series of straw polls among members of the UN security council remained deadlocked, with all seven candidates at the time having drawn negative opinions from at least two of the security council’s five permanent members on October 16.
Since then, she has won the support of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which comprises Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, as well as of Lebanon, the Maldives, North Macedonia, Albania, Kazakhstan, and Cyprus. Bahrain is at present a non-permanent security council member.
US reportedly pushing Viktor Orban for role
A new straw poll of security council members is expected to take place on Friday, though Nusseibeh’s path is not entirely clear, with the Wall Street Journal reporting on Monday that it had been informed by sources from three countries that the United States is encouraging former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban to seek the office.
Orban served as prime minister of Hungary between 2010 and May this year, and during that time was heavily criticised for his stance on Russia, which was markedly softer than most other European Union leaders.
He met Russian President Vladimir Putin just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and often stalled EU aid for Ukraine and efforts to impose sanctions on Russia in the invasion’s aftermath until his ouster earlier this year.
On Cyprus, Orban drew criticism from the European Union in 2024 after attending an Organisation of Turkic States summit in Kyrgyzstan and sitting alongside then Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar at a meal.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief at the time, said that “Hungary has not received any mandate from the European Council to advance relations with the OTS” and that “the EU rejects the attempts by the OTS to legitimise the Turkish Cypriot secessionist entity”.
Nusseibeh would be first female UN secretary-general
Were Nusseibeh to be elected to the role and take office on January 1, she would be the first female UN secretary-general and the second Arab to hold the post, after Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali held the role between 1992 and 1996.
Should Orban be elected, it will be the first time that consecutive secretaries-general have been from the same continent since Boutros-Ghali was succeeded by Ghana’s Kofi Annan, and the first time that there have been two consecutive European secretaries-general since Norway’s Trygve Lie and Sweden’s Dag Hammarskjolsd were the post’s two first permanent holders.
