ELEVATOR PITCH. If you had just 60 minutes on a podium, shared with three other contenders, to convince the world why you’d be the best person to run its top multilateral organisation – with an in-tray of no small tasks that include preventing conflicts, ending world hunger, lifting people out of poverty and tackling climate change – all while coming up with a masterplan for how the UN should get its own house in order, what would you boil your key messages down to?

Four of the five candidates running to replace António Guterres as secretary general will do just that tomorrow during a public debate taking place at the Maison de la Paix in Geneva.

👥Who’s joining. Michelle Bachelet, Rebeca Grynspan, María Fernanda Espinosa – a relative newcomer to the race – and Macky Sall, who’ll give an intervention online, will share their priorities for the UN in a friendly sparring session moderated by BBC broadcast journalist Zeinab Badawi.

🗣️Speak to the people. Organised by the nonprofit GWL Voices and the UN Foundation, the debate comes after the UN’s own livestreamed interactive dialogues between candidates and member states in April. (Espinosa’s will take place on 15 June.)

But whereas those individual grillings lasted three hours (who has time to watch 12 hours in total of interviews?), the organisers said the aim of this event is to make the UN selection process more accessible to the larger public.

“It’s a way for candidates to come together and have a conversation, and have the opportunity to exchange views all together,” GWL Voices co-founder and former UN SG candidate Susana Malcorra told us.

🫥No show. There’s much speculation as to why Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, the fifth contender on the list, will not be there tomorrow. One theory: The IAEA boss will have the podium to himself at a separate event at the Geneva Graduate Institute on 18 June, the week of the G7 Summit in Evian, on “the importance of multilateral organisations: how they and their leaders can step up to the challenges of today”. That sounds like a job pitch to us.

— Kasmira Jefford

❝How the next UN chief can end the era of stalled multilateralism. As stalled negotiations – from plastics to health to nuclear risk – pile up, the next UN secretary general can restore faith in multilateralism by creating a unit to support negotiations, write negotiation experts Jérôme Bellion-Jourdan and Hayley Walker.