I recently received a message from my friend, Ambassador Magd Abdel Fattah, a distinguished diplomat, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, and former Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on African Affairs. He invited me to watch the public dialogue with the candidates for the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.
It immediately sparked my curiosity.
Five candidates sit before the world, each presenting a vision for the future of the Organization, answering questions, and trying to persuade a global audience watching on screens that they are the most qualified person to lead the world’s foremost international political institution.
On the surface, the scene appears deeply democratic.
Transparency. Public dialogue. Candidates. Questions. A global audience.
Yet the first question that came to my mind was both simple and, perhaps, unsettling:
Will this debate actually determine who becomes the next Secretary-General of the United Nations?
The answer, of course, is no.
The Secretary-General is not elected directly by the peoples of the world. Nor is the position freely decided by the General Assembly. Public debates do not determine the outcome. Under the UN Charter, the Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.
And that is where real politics begins.
Within the Security Council sit five permanent members armed with the power of veto: the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom. In practical terms, this means that the path to the Secretary-General’s office passes through a very narrow gate—one that no candidate can cross if even one of the major powers decides to close it.
A candidate may be the most qualified.
They may have the deepest experience.
They may present the strongest vision.
They may even win the admiration of the world during a public debate.
Yet they can still be eliminated behind closed doors simply because one great power does not want them.
That is why these debates are fascinating—not necessarily because they determine the winner, but because they reveal a deeper paradox within the international political system:
Democracy before the cameras… power behind closed doors.
But is this paradox unique to the United Nations?
I fear it has become, to varying degrees, a miniature reflection of what is happening across much of our world.
The candidates will speak to a global audience.
They will discuss peace, sustainable development, human rights, international law, and institutional reform.
We will listen carefully.
Yet somewhere else, the calculations that truly matter will be taking place.
What does Washington want?
What will Moscow accept?
Who can Beijing live with?
Whom will London and Paris not oppose?
And what balance between the Global North and the Global South is considered acceptable?
If the institution that is supposed to represent the nations of the world cannot choose its own Secretary-General without first securing the consent of the five victorious powers of a war that ended more than eighty years ago, then to what extent does the international system truly reflect the world of today?
The world has changed.
New powers have emerged.
The number of UN member states has multiplied several times since the Organization’s founding.
The global economy has changed.
Population distribution has changed.
Technology has transformed every aspect of life.
Yet the basic architecture of international power still bears the unmistakable imprint of 1945.
The paradox is therefore unmistakable.
We urge states to embrace democracy within their borders, while the system governing relations among those states is itself far from democratic in the same sense.
In the General Assembly, a small state and a nation of more than a billion people each have one vote. Yet the real power of decision remains concentrated in the hands of a very small group of states through the Security Council.
It is democracy among nations at one level—and an aristocracy of power at another.
Perhaps the problem is that we have become accustomed to thinking of democracy as a collection of procedures, when in reality it is a philosophy of distributing power.
The fundamental question in any political system is not simply:
Who gets to vote?
It is also:
Who actually has the power to decide?
Who has the power to say no?
Who can change the rules?
Who can remain in office even when everyone else wants change?
These questions apply to individual states just as much as they apply to the international system.
They apply to parliaments just as they apply to the Security Council.
They apply to national elections just as they apply to selecting the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
I do not write this to argue that democracy is an illusion.
Quite the opposite.
I continue to believe that democracy remains the best system humanity has devised for managing differences, ensuring peaceful transfers of power, and correcting mistakes without resorting to violence.
But defending democracy does not mean turning it into a sacred doctrine beyond criticism.
Its true defense lies in constantly examining and improving it.
A democracy that cannot criticize itself eventually becomes an ideology of its own.
The question we should be asking today is not merely:
Are we democratic societies?
Rather:
Is democracy, in the form it took shape during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, still capable of governing the realities of the twenty-first?
A world of multinational corporations.
Artificial intelligence.
Algorithms that know more about citizens than politicians do.
Enormous concentrations of wealth capable of shaping public opinion.
Digital platforms that can spread a false story to one hundred million people before the truth has even had time to put on its shoes.
I will watch the public dialogue for the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.
I will listen carefully to the candidates.
I will try to judge who presents the most convincing vision.
But as I watch, I will also know that another debate is taking place—one that is never broadcast.
It is the debate of interests, power, and geopolitical balance.
That is not necessarily a bad thing; politics has always been the management of interests and power.
The real danger begins when the distance between what people see and what actually determines their future becomes too great.
That is when institutions begin to lose public trust.
Democracy risks becoming a beautifully staged performance while the ending is written in another room.
Perhaps this is where a broader conversation should begin:
Is today’s democratic crisis a crisis of the idea itself, or a crisis of the widening gap between its appearance and its substance?
Can democracy renew itself before people lose faith in it?
And then comes the most difficult question of all—particularly for those of us in the developing world:
Is democracy a single universal model to be applied identically in every society, or is it a broader human philosophy that, in each society, requires institutions, political culture, and an appropriate stage of development before it can become a genuine practice rather than merely a performance for the cameras?
