An Emirati official with Palestinian roots, Lana Nusseibeh has emerged as a late frontrunner in the race to lead the United Nations, campaigning on a reformist agenda and vowing to work for peace.
Since her official nomination on Wednesday, she has already garnered the backing of Gulf states but also faced scrutiny over her country’s normalisation with Israel and Abu Dhabi’s alleged role in Sudan’s war.
If she succeeds, she would be the first woman and the second Arab to snatch the job in what would be a tour de force for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a Middle East power that was under Iranian attack earlier this year.
In a campaign video, she vows if elected to “bring greater urgency to the work for peace” and “defend human rights”, speaking in perfect English with a slight British accent.
The long-haired brunette, 48, sporting a red suit, projects the image of a modern Arab woman, one that her country has long sought to portray.
“Lana Nusseibeh has a thick CV,” said Emirati political science academic Abdulkhaleq Abdulla. “She brings in the best of the UAE’s diplomacy.” She stepped down from her post as state minister at the foreign ministry and as envoy to the UN and EU to campaign for the top UN job.
A seasoned diplomat, she has also served as the UAE’s permanent representative to the UN, from 2013 to 2024, the first woman to hold the post.
Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for Gaza under a US-backed “Board of Peace”, said Nusseibeh “does not give up when the room gets difficult”.
“She is relentless, but never in a way that overwhelms people,” he said.
Palestinian roots
Nusseibeh comes from a prominent Palestinian family of statesmen, uprooted by the creation of Israel in 1948.
Her family traditionally held the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the walled Old City of Jerusalem.
Yet she has defended the Abraham Accords, under which the UAE normalised ties with Israel in 2020, drawing criticism from pro-Palestinian activists and commentators on social media.
Her grandfather was defence minister in Jordan in the 1950s and one of the first Palestinians to be in contact with the Israelis, while her father Zaki Nusseibeh was an adviser and interpreter to the UAE’s late founding president Sheikh Zayed.
He currently serves as cultural adviser to the UAE president and was also a state minister.
Nusseibeh has two sons. She holds two master’s degrees, including one in Israeli and Jewish diaspora studies from the University of London.
‘No candidate short of criticism’
Nusseibeh’s nomination has sparked some backlash over her country’s involvement in the Sudan war, where the UAE is accused of backing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — accusations it denies.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a war between the army and the RSF, triggering what the United Nations has described as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
“There is no candidate that is short of criticism… We’ll just have to deal with it, especially the Sudan file,” Abdulla told AFP.
“The UAE has already stated time and again that all of these are media allegations, and we have already made it clear that… we deny all of them, and we do not send any arms or finance the RSF,” he added.
It is tradition that the UN’s top job rotates between different regions.
Under that premise, the role should go to a candidate from Latin America this time. But US ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz recently said the focus should be on picking the “best candidate” instead of the region or gender.
In the latest informal straw poll held last week to gauge which candidates have a shot of becoming the next UN secretary general, every contender received an effective veto.
Five of the 15 members of the UN Security Council wield veto power and can shut down any candidate unacceptable to them, which happened Friday when all seven candidates received at least two vetoes.