Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet has withdrawn from the race to succeed António Guterres as United Nations Secretary-General, days after a Security Council straw poll showed her support had collapsed, Hiru News reported.
Bachelet, 74, announced the decision in a video posted to Instagram and said she would continue her international work. Her exit leaves seven candidates for the post; Guterres’s second term ends on 31 December.
The poll that ended it
In the third informal straw poll, held on Friday, Bachelet received a single “encourage” vote against 11 “discourage” votes and three “no opinion”. Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan led the same poll with nine encouraging votes.
Straw polls are non-binding soundings of the fifteen Council members, but a count of that shape is conventionally read as terminal — particularly because discourage votes may conceal a permanent member’s veto, which the ballots do not distinguish.
Why the name matters in Colombo
Hiru’s report makes the Sri Lankan connection explicit, and it is the reason this is more than a distant procedural story. Bachelet served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022, a period in which her office reported repeatedly on Sri Lanka.
That reporting raised concerns over accountability, enforced disappearances, impunity and unresolved allegations of serious rights violations — the body of work that framed successive Human Rights Council resolutions on the country and which remains the reference point for the OHCHR’s continuing Sri Lanka mandate.
Her candidacy would have placed a former High Commissioner with a documented record on Sri Lanka at the head of the organisation. That will not now happen.
Not reported
Hiru does not name the seven remaining candidates, give the date of the next straw poll, or say whether any of the discourage votes came from permanent members. It also does not report Bachelet’s stated reasons beyond her intention to continue international work, or any Sri Lankan government reaction — none had been issued at the time of publication.
