MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The race for the next United Nations secretary-general is heating up. Candidates spent hours answering questions at the U.N. this week. They include the head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog and a former Chilean president. But there are still many months to go before the world body chooses a new leader, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
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MICHELLE BACHELET: Good morning, (non-English language spoken).
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Chile's former president, Michelle Bachelet, offers greetings in all six official U.N. languages as she sat down for a three-hour public interview. She was the first of four declared candidates to take part in such sessions overseen by the president of the General Assembly, former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.
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ANNALENA BAERBOCK: Our choice will demonstrate whether the United Nations truly represents the more than 8 billion people around the world, who are half women and girls.
KELEMEN: The U.S. and other permanent Security Council members have the power to block candidates. And at a recent Senate hearing, U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz shared Republican concerns about Bachelet, a center-left politician who was a U.N. high commissioner for human rights and the first head of U.N. Women.
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MIKE WALTZ: The conventional wisdom in - up in New York is it's never been someone from Latin America. And there's never been a woman. So therefore, it must be a Latin American woman. We have taken the position of we just need the best.
KELEMEN: There was a secretary-general from Latin America, Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru. But that was decades ago. And the idea is to have a regional rotation.
ANJALI DAYAL: So the understanding is that Latin America's term is up again.
KELEMEN: That's Anjali Dayal, an associate professor of international politics at Fordham University. She says there are no written rules on how a secretary-general is selected. Nominees have to be endorsed by the Security Council before the General Assembly votes. The timing is also not set, but Antonio Guterres' term ends on January 1.
DAYAL: In an ideal world, there will be someone in place to take up the position before that (laughter). And in this very much more politically divided climate, I suspect we're going to see the deliberations run up right to the wire.
KELEMEN: And she expects more candidates to jump in. Costa Rica put forward former Vice President Rebeca Grynspan, who has led U.N. trade and development. She played a key role in helping Ukraine export its grain after Russia invaded, diplomacy that took some persistence.
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REBECA GRYNSPAN: I navigated many noes until I heard a yes.
KELEMEN: A former president of Senegal, Macky Sall, is the only African in the race so far. U.N. watchers say the candidate to beat is from Argentina, Rafael Grossi, who remains at the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Dayal says normally a candidate would take a leave of absence to run.
DAYAL: To the extent that he is the front-runner right now, it's actually hard to know what the next couple of months are going to hold for the nuclear watchdog chief of the United Nations. So that's a tricky position for him to occupy.
KELEMEN: Grossi has been at the center of Iran diplomacy and says he knows how to balance the big and smaller powers.
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RAFAEL GROSSI: The art of being a good secretary-general is to keep these good balances in place.
KELEMEN: He and the other candidates faced a lot of questions about the U.N.'s current liquidity crisis, caused in part by U.S. cuts. Ambassador Waltz says he's looking for a candidate committed to cost cutting.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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