The UN voted to make a Portuguese politician the next Secretary General, namely Antonio Gutteres. Thereby hangs a tale of hubris and craven folly among the world’s top political leaders. This one is a three-pipe problem, as Sherlock Holmes was wont to say, so settle into your most ergonomic reposers. I have written on this topic several times, even specifically on the background to Gutteres’s nomination. To grasp how it came to pass we have to spelunk into the twisted arcana of EU power politics – the European Union, mind you, not the UN. I didn’t use the wrong acronym by mistake. And we know how Moscow likes to exploit the EU’s perplexities, as it did in this case too. So let’s start with what I wrote about Guterres in a previous column:
Gutteres belongs to the Party of European Socialists (PES). His nomination by Portugal boosts the leverage of the entire party in Europe. Their region-wide rivals, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), led by Angela Merkel, don’t like it. So, all of a sudden, there’s a move by the EPP and the distinctly more right-wing leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, to oppose Gutteres. To do so, they are considering nominating Kristalina Georgieva, one of their own EU functionaries.
Which is precisely what they did. Orban and the EPP managed to get Georgieva nominated by her home country Bulgaria. There was a problem. Bulgaria had already nominated a candidate, perhaps the leading candidate, by the name of Irina Bokova, the current head of Unesco. Everybody knew that the Russians wanted an Eastern European and the West wanted a woman. So the initial Bulgarian candidate Bokova looked like the ideal choice. Here was a chance for little old Bulgaria to shine on the world stage for the first time in over a millenium, possibly since the Bulgars burst out of Central Asia on horseback. Add this to the background context: it is unprecedented for a country to nominate a candidate officially, a front-runner no less, and then do a public switcheroo before the world’s eyes. But that’s exactly what Bulgaria did just a week ago. Bokova was dumped and Georgieva spooned up. Disaster ensued, as I predicted it would in previous columns .
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Bulgaria lost its once-in-a-millenium chance at shaping the world. As the record shows, Gutteres won.
If Bulgaria were a normal healthy country, the Prime Minister would now resign and the government would fall. Because, it was the Prime Minister’s decision to switch candidates. He did so despite knowing that two-thirds of Bulgarian citizens preferred his first candidate. Boyko Borissov is his name, a deeply underachieving dull-witted schemer-survivor in the wooden tradition of the region. A short-fingered Bulgarian if ever there was one. He first came to the fore as the bodyguard of the last Bulgarian Communist leader. That should give you a clue to the man’s qualities. So why did Boyko ‘switch horses’? Why did he do it? He had to know that Georgieva would never win, that she’d never get past the Russian veto. Everybody else knew it. Even I knew it. Here’s what I wrote:
she faces an insuperable problem. The Russians will automatically reject her. They have said so explicitly in the official state gazette. She was and is still a candidate without hope, and must simply let it go for everyone’s sake: her country’s, the UN’s, the world’s. Alas she hasn’t let go and indeed has redoubled her backstairs string-pulling. It won’t alter the outcome – her candidacy to nowhere cannot override Moscow’s certain veto. Why are the Russians set against her? Georgieva, a Vice President of the European Commission, has run the EU’s budget during the time of (much deserved) sanctions against Russia. Said sanctions will certainly be renewed imminently.
The record shows that, in the event, Georgieva had two Security Council vetoes against her – such things aren’t conducted transparently at that strange institution so we have to make an informed guess. (The Security Council does a semi-opaque straw-poll, then the unscathed candidate gets endorsed by the wider UN). My information says Russia and China were the two naysayers, predictably. Beijing likes to back Moscow on all important Security Council votes. Just to rub salt into Bulgaria’s wounds, one should mention that Georgieva came in eighth whereas the original nominee, who remained an independent candidate, came in fourth. And that’s without her country’s official nomination! Arguably, Irina Bokova could have won.
That has certainly been my position all along. Oddly enough, Georgieva’s behind-the-scenes campaign boosters managed to persuade leading media organs of her viability. In this New York Times article, for example, you encounter the following stand-alone sentence “Diplomats say Georgieva is tough competition for (Guterres)”. Really? So a hopelessly quixotic candidacy presents tough competition?
The NYT was one of many. What happened to all these august tribunes of the news media that they all called it so wrong in the face of perfectly predictable disaster – unlike me, I’m happy to point out. Answer: They were bamboozled by formidable EU politicians who operated according to their internecine turf-war considerations. To that end, Bulgar PM Borissov was promised $160 million by the EU for migrant-border expenses along the Turkey-Bulgaria border, and the country’s newsmedia buzzed with reports of threats that Bulgaria would be punished financially if Borissov didn’t fall in line.
As for Russia – here’s a riposte for everyone who thought backing Georgieva and the EU’s EPP faction would be a rebuke to Putin. The exact opposite has happened. Not only has the opposing EU faction, the Socialist Parties, won out with Guterres becoming UN Secretary General, but they tend to be far more actively pro-Putin than Bokova. Which is why the Russians immediately dumped their preference for an Eastern European when it came time to get serious. Offered the chance to snooker Merkel, Moscow vetoed Georgieva and voted in Gutteres.