In a packed auditorium at Geneva’s Maison de la Paix on Tuesday, three leading candidates for the next United Nations secretary-general, when António Guterres’s term ends this year, presented their visions for the future of the organization.
Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile; María Fernanda Espinosa, a former president of the UN General Assembly, from Ecuador; and Rebeca Grynspan, head of the UN Trade and Development agency, from Costa Rica, all appeared in a public debate on June 9, moderated by the veteran journalist Zeinab Badawi.
The Maison de la Paix is a building owned by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and located next to the Palais des Nations, the UN’s compound in the Swiss city, which overlooks Lake Geneva and beyond to the French Alps. The UN campuse is home to the Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Refugee Agency, among other offices and agencies.
Macky Sall, a former Senegalese president, sent a recorded video message of about 2 minutes and 30 seconds, while the International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi, another candidate, who is from Argentina, did not participate. He told the organizers — GWL Voices and the UN Foundation — that he had a scheduling conflict, and they offered an option to join the dialogue virtually or to send a recorded message, but he declined. (The debate was announced by GWL Voices in late January.)
The candidates participating in the hourlong session answered questions from Badawi and the audience — diplomats, civil society representatives, students, a parliamentarian and UN folks, including Tatiana Valovaya (head of UN Geneva) — on a range of issues confronting the multilateral organization and the candidates suitability for the role. The question/answer part moved well, with some levity, under Badawi’s guidance.
As Helen Clark, a former New Zealand prime minister, ex-head of the UN Development Program and a secretary-general candidate in 2016, said of the event, “It was very different with just women, who stuck to the issues, not really bothering with diplomatic niceties.”
(Meanwhile, the rumor mill on other possible candidates is churning. They include Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed; Nickolay Mladenov, who runs the technical arm of the Trump-led Board of Peace; Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, president of Kazakhstan; and María Angela Holguín, the UN personal envoy for Cyprus and a former Colombian politician. On June 13, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Guyana’s ambassador to the UN, threw her hat in the ring.)
In making their points, the candidates cited statistics and made assertions that PassBlue has fact-checked. (Each candidate also took questions from reporters after the debate.)
Peace and security
The sharpest discussion centered on the role of the UN boss in conflict prevention and peacemaking. It is an area in which the organization is facing some of its toughest public criticism in decades, including from the United States.
Responding to a question on whether the next secretary-general should act as an independent political actor or primarily as a facilitator among the organization’s 193 member states, all three candidates rejected the idea that the role must be one or the other.
Bachelet, drawing on her experience as a former UN high commissioner for human rights, said that prevention requires deep engagement with local realities rather than relying solely on institutional reporting.
Grynspan, who is also a former vice president of Costa Rica, said that the UN has become too reluctant to take diplomatic initiatives. The secretary-general must be willing to risk failure in pursuit of peace.
Espinosa said that the next UN chief must be physically present in conflict zones and actively engaged with diplomats.
Claim (Espinosa): The UN is the only universal body that brings the entire world in one place.
Record: The UN has 193 member states and is the only global intergovernmental organization with near-universal membership and a comprehensive mandate spanning peace, development, human rights and international cooperation.
Verdict (factual): Technically, other international organizations exist, but none match the UN’s universal membership and mandate.
Development
On development, the candidates contended with questions about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are scheduled to expire in 2030 and have barely reached their targets since their inception in 2015.
Espinosa said the SDGs remain the correct framework for global development, but she argued that such work cannot be delivered from UN headquarters in New York City. Instead, she called for greater national ownership, supported by reforms to the international financial architecture.
Bachelet emphasized the mismatch between available global wealth and development financing. She argued that current resources are unevenly distributed and insufficiently mobilized.
Claim (Bachelet): The world currently has $430 trillion in wealth.
Record: Global wealth estimates vary significantly, depending on methodology. Credit Suisse and UBS estimate total global wealth at $454.4 trillion in their most recent comprehensive report.
Verdict (slightly understated): The figure stated by Bachelet is closer to 2021 estimates, according to Forbes.
Global hunger
Claim (Grynspan): There are 96 million people today enduring hunger, more than in 2015.
Record: The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, published annually by the FAO and four other UN agencies, estimates that approximately 673 million people faced hunger in 2024, down from 795 million in 2015. That represents 122 million fewer people going hungry than about a decade ago. This decline since 2015 was driven partly by improvements in southern Asia and Latin America. However, the picture is more complicated when using the broader food insecurity measure, which says that 2.3 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2024 compared with 1.6 billion in 2015.
Verdict (misleading): On the primary measure used by SOFI to track hunger, Grynspan’s claim is not supported by the data. The SOFI report showed that hunger has actually fallen since 2015 from 795 million people to 673 million. However, hunger has also continued to rise in Africa and western Asia and the world remains far above pre-pandemic levels and off track to meet the UN’s Zero Hunger goal by 2030 going by the broader food insecurity measure.
Grynspan’s core point about the severity of the hunger crisis is correct but the numbers do not support her. Her claim that hunger is worse now than in 2015 is only true when using a broader definition of food insecurity, but the figure she gave was incorrect.
“It is estimated that about 2.3 billion people in the world were moderately or severely food insecure in 2024, which is still 335 million more than in 2019, before the pandemic, and 683 million more compared to 2015, when the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was launched,” says the State of Food and Insecurity Report.
Human rights
Grynspan said human rights is a comprehensive structure and not a menu of obligations. She warned against the growing politicization of both human rights and international humanitarian law.
Bachelet argued that peace, development and human rights are inseparable and warned against efforts to weaken international human rights norms. She called for stronger support for national institutions, independent judiciaries, civil society organizations and journalists.
Claim (Bachelet): Human rights funding receives only about four percent of overall UN budgeting.
Record: The UN human rights pillar has long received a tiny share of overall UN resources, typically around three to seven percent of the regular budget.
Verdict (mostly factual): Bachelet’s figure is too precise, given that such totals are often estimates.
Climate change
Climate change emerged as one of the few areas where all candidates expressed visible frustration. Bachelet said that places hardest hit, small island states, low‑lying coastal communities and areas suffering from extreme weather are usually not in the rooms where decisions are made about climate policy.
Grynspan said multilateral development banks and the private sector should be brought included in climate finance sources to redirect financial flows toward countries that are left out of decision-making. She highlighted inequities in climate finance, noting that Africa receives only a minimal fraction of global renewable energy investment.
Claim (Grynspan): Only two percent of the foreign direct investment in renewable energy goes to Africa.
Record: Recent international finance reports consistently show Africa receiving a very small share of global clean-energy investment, often around two to three percent.
Verdict (factual): The precise percentage varies by source and year. The International Energy Agency gave the figure at two percent and the Energy Transition Africa set it at three percent.
Espinosa said that after nearly three decades of annual UN-led climate summits, global emissions continue to rise. She added that climate change should no longer be viewed solely as an environmental issue but as a development, security, economic and industrial challenge.
Claim (Espinosa): The UN has held 30 climate conferences, but emissions still grow.
Record: The UN climate agenda has included nearly annual meetings (known as Conference of the Parties) since the mid-1990s. Global greenhouse-gas emissions remain near-record highs despite decades of negotiations.
Verdict (factual): Global emissions stand at 60.4 billion tons CO2e 100 year, compared with 57.7 billion tons CO2e 100 year in 2021.
UN trust crisis
When asked how they would restore confidence in multilateralism among younger generations, all three candidates argued that the UN’s legitimacy depends less on rhetoric and more on providing tangible results.
Espinosa said the UN did not suffer from a crisis of purpose but rather a crisis of delivery. While acknowledging recent reforms and ambitions, such as the Pact for the Future and the creation of youth-focused mechanisms, younger generations must become more active participants in decision-making, she said.
Bachelet said the secretary-general must make the UN results‑oriented, so young people see the real impact of the organization.
Grynspan said the UN must address the issues that directly affect younger generations and highlighted a demographic imbalance within the institution itself.
Claim (Grynspan): Only four percent of UN staff are under 30 years old.
Record: UN workforce demographics have consistently shown low representation of staff under age 30. According to demographics from the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB), staff under 30 make up roughly 2.5 to 4 percent of the global UN workforce, with the average age of a UN staffer being 46 years old.
Verdict (factual): The figure is consistent with UN demographic reporting.
Dulcie Leimbach contributed reporting from Geneva.
This article was updated: A previous version of the fact-check on hunger stated that 122 million more people were living in hunger today than in 2015. That figure was inverted, and the initialy verdict “Vastly understated” was wrong as a result.
Damilola Banjo is an award-winning staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees all video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, N.C. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
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Damilola that you again for this great contribution. I am happy to see that the 2 male candidates have run away and that is a reality the world has seen and will guide many to choose a woman as the next UNSG. Regarding the staff age, I think that this is based on the requirements as we know the UN needs people with years of experience to be able to help and guide others. I agree with a results-oriented UN, however we cannot ignore the active push for the marginalisation of the UN by certain member states which believe that the UN is opposed to their will and ambitions to dominate, exploit and destroy others by imposing their rules and vision based on supremacy and power!. My great congratulations to my 3 excellent sisters, I am very proud of each of you,