Guterres Delivers Farewell UN Address as Successor Race Stalls and Funding Crisis Deepens

António Guterres stood at the UN's green marble podium this week and delivered his last address as Secretary-General. His second five-year term ends December 31, 2026, according to SBS. "I will continue to stand up for the values of the United Nations Charter and I will never, ever give up," he told the assembled diplomats, according to both SBS and TIME.

It doesn't answer who runs the place next, or whether the UN can even pay its bills while they figure it out.

No Consensus, Seven Candidates, Three Failed Polls

Seven candidates are currently in the running to replace Guterres, according to TIME. The process kicked off in November when the presidents of the General Assembly and Security Council sent a joint letter inviting member states to nominate someone. That letter noted, with regret, that no woman has ever held the job and urged countries to consider nominating one, TIME and SBS both report.

Guyana's UN ambassador, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, is one of the top contenders, according to Bloomberg. But the 15-member Security Council has run three straw polls without landing on a consensus pick, per SBS. The final call belongs to that council, not the 193-member General Assembly, no matter how many countries get a say in the hearings.

The Security Council includes Russia and China alongside the US, UK and France, each holding veto power. Whoever gets the job has to survive all five of them agreeing not to block. That's a low bar for gridlock and a high bar for reform.

The Money Problem Nobody's Solving

Since President Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has pulled the US out of dozens of UN bodies and slashed American contributions, according to SBS. The outlet describes the organization as being pushed "to the brink of financial collapse."

The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro, writing in an opinion piece, put a dollar figure on it: he says the UN system requires between $66 billion and $69 billion a year, with American taxpayers covering roughly a quarter of that, or $15 billion to $18 billion annually. Those figures are Shapiro's characterization of the broader UN system, not an independently audited budget line, and should be read as his argument rather than a verified accounting. Shapiro's core complaint is straightforward: the US spends more on the UN than on the Coast Guard, the IRS, or the FBI and ATF combined, and gets, in his words, an organization that sends peacekeepers who fail to stop mass killings.

Defenders of the institution would counter that the UN runs food programs, vaccine distribution, and refugee operations that no single country replicates, and that Guterres himself used his farewell to push for a two-state solution, climate action, and AI regulation as unfinished business worth funding. Whether it's worth $18 billion a year from American taxpayers is a fair question this article doesn't resolve, because no source here puts a specific return-on-investment number against Shapiro's cost figure.

Culture Fights Play Out Alongside the Diplomacy

While the succession fight and the money fight play out inside the building, other battles happened around its edges this week. The Health and Human Services Department's Bethany Kozma and Natalie Dodson addressed the Geneva Consensus Declaration's first-ever dedicated UN General Assembly event, according to the Daily Signal. The declaration is a 43-nation coalition asserting there's no international right to abortion. The Biden administration had exited the coalition; the Trump administration rejoined after January 2025 and the US took over as secretariat from Hungary in June, per the Daily Signal. Argentina and the Dominican Republic are the newest members.

"Life is worthy of protection. Women and girls deserve the opportunity to achieve optimal health throughout their lives," Kozma said in remarks obtained by the Daily Signal.

Outside the building, a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's UN appearance drew a few hundred demonstrators, according to the Daily Wire's Shapiro, who called the protesters "vile America haters" in an opinion column. That's Shapiro's characterization; no news source in this record independently verifies protester numbers or motives beyond his account.

Meanwhile, Bolivia's new president, Rodrigo Paz, used his debut UN speech to tell the assembly that "socialism doesn't put food on the table," according to Breitbart. Paz, who took office in November 2025 ending two decades of Movement Towards Socialism rule, held up a coca leaf on stage, a direct callback to predecessor Evo Morales's 2006 UN appearance, and blamed 20 years of socialist policy for reducing a once gas-and-mining-rich Bolivia to negotiating with multilateral lenders.

With three straw polls deadlocked and no woman ever having held the top job despite the General Assembly's explicit request to consider one, the question remains whether the Security Council's veto powers will produce a consensus pick before Guterres's January 1 exit, or whether the UN will start 2027 without a confirmed successor.