With barely two months left before António Guterres hands over, Ankara has decided the contest for the top job at the United Nations needs another contender. On Friday Turkey formally put forward Feridun Sinirlioglu, the seasoned diplomat now serving as secretary-general of the OSCE, the Vienna-based European security body.
The timing was no accident. Hours earlier, yet another informal straw poll in the Security Council had failed to produce a front-runner. In these closed-door rounds each of the 15 council members marks every hopeful as “encourage”, “discourage” or “no opinion”, and so far nobody has broken away from the pack. A stalled field is exactly the kind of opening a late entrant hopes for.
The paperwork, signed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reached New York via Turkey’s UN ambassador Ahmet Yildiz. In it, Erdogan pointed to more than forty years in diplomacy and praised what he called his candidate’s “culture of consensus”. Sinirlioglu is hardly a stranger in New York: he served as Turkey’s permanent representative there from 2016 to 2023, also served as foreign minister, and was picked by Guterres in 2023 to lead an independent review on Afghanistan. Since December 2024 he has been the first Turk to head the OSCE secretariat.
He joins a crowded and high-profile list. Eight hopefuls were already declared, among them Chile’s ex-president Michelle Bachelet, Argentina’s Rafael Grossi of the nuclear watchdog, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan and Senegal’s Macky Sall.
Popularity alone will not decide it. A winner needs at least nine votes on the council and must also survive without a single veto from the permanent five, meaning the United States, China, Russia, France and Britain, whose relations are deeply strained. Confirmation by the General Assembly is then treated as routine. Whoever emerges will start a five-year term when the calendar turns to 2027.
