Within weeks of each other, two closely watched multilateral leadership contests will move towards their conclusion. António Guterres’s second term as UN Secretary-General ends on December 31. In mid-November, meanwhile, leaders of the Francophone world will gather in Phnom Penh to choose the next Secretary-General of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). One contest is shaped by secret Security Council straw polls and the veto power of five permanent members; the other by summit diplomacy, consensus and coalition-building. Read together, they offer a revealing picture of how international influence is accumulated, negotiated and tested — and of where Africa, particularly the Great Lakes region, sits within that struggle. A Rwandan on the ballot Louise Mushikiwabo, Rwanda’s former foreign minister, was elected OIF Secretary-General in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. She is now seeking a third term for 2027–2030. At the OIF’s unprecedented formal candidates’ hearing in Paris on 30 June, Mushikiwabo presented herself as the continuity candidate, defending her record and the institutional reforms undertaken during her tenure without turning the process into a contest over regional grievances. Her challengers are Juliana Amata Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Coumba Bâ of Mauritania and former Romanian prime minister Dacian Cioloș. The Congolese candidacy inevitably carries particular political significance. At a time of profound tension between Kigali and Kinshasa, an institutional election can easily become another arena in which the Great Lakes rivalry is interpreted, amplified and internationalised. Whatever the individual merits of the candidates, therefore, the OIF race is unlikely to be viewed purely as a personnel decision. The symbolism is difficult to separate from the substance. The Francophonie is not simply a cultural association built around the French language. It is also a diplomatic network linking governments with sharply different political and strategic interests. For Kigali and Kinshasa, the contest therefore provides another measure of their relationships beyond the immediate region: who can build trust, mobilise partners and prevent bilateral tensions from defining a wider international candidacy? A more opaque race in New York The UN contest is murkier by design. Three informal Security Council straw polls have been held, but the Council does not officially publish the results. Diplomatic reporting from the third round gave Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan nine “encourage” votes, five “discourage” votes and one “no opinion”. Guyana’s Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett received eight encourages, six discourages and one no opinion. Olara Otunnu of Uganda, Rafael Grossi of Argentina and Macky Sall of Senegal each received five “encourage” votes. Michelle Bachelet withdrew after the third poll, leaving seven declared candidates and the possibility that others could still enter the race. The arithmetic is unforgiving. A formal Security Council recommendation requires at least nine affirmative votes and, crucially, no veto from any of its five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. A candidate can therefore command broad support and still be blocked by a single permanent member. That helps explain why the race remains unsettled even after one candidate reached the nine-vote mark in an informal ballot. The African thread Africa is prominent in both contests, but its leverage takes different forms. In the OIF race, three of the four candidates are African, reflecting a continent that has become the demographic centre of gravity of the Francophone world. At the UN, Sall and Otunnu represent the two African candidacies in the seven-person field. Their presence also comes at a time when African governments continue to press for greater representation and influence within institutions whose structures were largely designed in a different geopolitical era. But the larger question is not simply whether African states “back their own”. It is whether they can coordinate their interests across institutions whose rules reward disciplined coalition-building. Multilateral influence rarely rests on numbers alone. It depends on whether those numbers can be organised into a coherent negotiating position. That distinction matters particularly now, when African states are increasingly demanding greater representation in global governance while often approaching decisive negotiations through several overlapping regional, linguistic and political blocs. Representation creates presence. Coordination converts presence into leverage. The two races provide a useful test of the distance between the two. What the two races reveal The mechanisms could hardly be more different. The OIF decision will be made by heads of state and government at the Phnom Penh summit on 15–16 November. The UN process, by contrast, is filtered through a Security Council in which five states retain extraordinary power to block a candidate before the choice reaches the wider General Assembly. Yet both contests ultimately arrive at the same political test: can a candidate become acceptable to enough centres of power without becoming so contested that victory itself weakens the mandate to govern? For Rwanda, the OIF stakes are unusually concrete. A third Mushikiwabo term would extend a diplomatic platform in which Kigali has invested for eight years. A loss — particularly to the Congolese candidate — would inevitably invite interpretations extending far beyond the candidates’ individual records and programmes. November will therefore measure more than an OIF succession. It will also test the reach of Rwanda’s diplomacy at a moment when tensions in the Great Lakes region increasingly intersect with politics in wider multilateral forums. Alongside it, the UN succession poses an even larger question. In a fractured international system, who ultimately determines global leadership: the many who belong to an institution, or the few whose consent remains indispensable? The writer is a communication specialist and strategist.
