It’s election day (for the UN Security Council)

Today, the UN General Assembly begins the process of electing new members to the UN Security Council. These elections are often formalities because regional groupings of states typically agree beforehand on which states from that region will get a turn at the high table (by agreement, the ten elected Security Council seats are apportioned regionally, so as to ensure balance) . Mark Goldberg lays out the ground rules for the elections here:

The elections today will fill: 1 seat for the African Group; 1 seat for the Asia-Pacific region; 1 seat for Latin American and the Caribbean; and 2 seats for the “Western Europe and Others” [WEOG] group.  To win a seat a country must secure the votes of at least two thirds of the General Assembly (that’s 129 “yay” votes).  The term lasts two years.

So long as there’s no division within the regional group, the vote at the full General Assembly is a formality. This year, however, there are two contested races. Australia, Finland and Luxembourg are competing for the two WEOG seats while Bhutan, Cambodia and South Korea are in a race for one spot. Most folks I’ve talked to believe Finland and Korea are shoo-ins. Australia and Luxembourg appear to be in a tough contest however. Australia’s bid–which was announced late–has proven controversial at home; some observers have commented acidly on the price tag for the diplomatic campaign, which appears to be about $25-30 million.

Richard Gowan argues here that the real story of this year’s Security Council election may be less who’s coming onto the Council than who’s leaving. Those exiting stage left  include behemoths  Germany, India, and South Africa. All three have designs on permanent Council seats and all three have had an eventful and controversial two years on the Council: 

[T]he U.N. is approaching the end of two turbulent years in which three major powers — Germany, India and South Africa — have held temporary seats in the council, playing prominent roles in its debates over Libya and Syria.  All three aspire to permanent seats in the forum, but have no choice but to head for the exit. (Colombia and Portugal are also off.) 

When the trio of powers won seats on the council two years ago, Bruce D. Jones and I warned in these pages that there was no guarantee that they would cooperate easily with the council’s five permanent members: the U.S, China, France, Russia and the U.K., collectively known as the P5. But we also argued that their presence could restore real credibility to the council, which has repeatedly been criticized for failing to adapt to changing global power dynamics. At the time, it seemed that the U.N. agenda would be dominated by African issues, such as South Sudan’s transition to independence and elections in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There was no reason to think that such matters would create major rifts in New York.

Events didn’t turn out that way. The Arab Spring put the Security Council in the limelight and threw it into confusion. Germany shocked the U.S., France and Britain by refusing to vote for military action in Libya in March 2011. While Berlin hastened to undo the diplomatic damage, India and South Africa attempted to carve out an independent position over the mounting crisis in Syria in collaboration with Brazil, which sat on the council from 2010 to 2011.