The interactive dialogues are done. Four candidates, Michelle Bachelet, Rafael Grossi, Rebeca Grynspan, and Macky Sall, have made their pitches. The Security Council’s straw polls are expected to begin in late July. What happens next may unfold faster than anyone anticipates. Or it may end before it starts, forcing a long and uncertain search for a successor. The reason is simple: there are very few candidates.

In past races, the Security Council worked through a large field, round by round, eliminating contenders until a consensus emerged. In 2016, António Guterres survived six rounds against a field of thirteen. In 2006, Ban Ki-moon was selected from a field of seven in four rounds, the only candidate to escape a veto. In 1996, after the United States vetoed Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s bid for a second term, four African candidates entered the race. France vetoed the English-speaking ones; the US and UK vetoed the French-speaking ones. After four rounds, France dropped its veto and Kofi Annan was selected.

Of all these cases, 1981 stands apart. It may also be the most instructive for what lies ahead. Kurt Waldheim was seeking a third term. China vetoed him in round after round. The United States vetoed his only rival, Salim Ahmed Salim of Tanzania. After sixteen rounds, neither candidate could prevail.

The 1981 case showed what happens when the field runs dry. Olara Otunnu, Uganda’s ambassador and that month’s Security Council president, devised a way out. He gave the permanent members a list of new candidates and asked which they would discourage. He also gave all fifteen members a second list asking which they would encourage. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar’s name was on the list. He was in Lima and had not campaigned. According to an interview he gave to the UN Intellectual History Project, he did not even know he was being considered until the Spanish ambassador called to tell him he had been elected.

He cleared the bar simply because he had no enemies—a dark horse, in other words, and not a bad one. Pérez de Cuéllar turned out to be one of the more effective secretaries-general in the organization’s history. But finding him required someone with the ingenuity of Otunnu, a Security Council willing to follow, and a credible name to put on the list. None of that is guaranteed in 2026.

This time the field is thin. If the straw polls proceed with only these four candidates, the arithmetic is stark. A first round would likely be enough to confirm what most observers already suspect: that Sall and Bachelet cannot clear the bar. Sall was nominated by a single state, Burundi, failed to get AU support and is quietly opposed by major African countries. Bachelet lost the backing of her own country, Chile, and now depends on Brazil and Mexico alone while facing strong US opposition.

That leaves Grossi and Grynspan. A second round focused on the two remaining Latin American candidates would, in theory, produce a winner. If one gets nine votes with no discouraging ballots from the five permanent members, the race will be over before the summer ends.

But the five permanent members may not agree on either of them. If one vetoes Grossi and another vetoes Grynspan, the Council arrives at a structural replay of 1981: two candidates, mutually blocked, with no exit. The Council would find itself in late summer with two vetoed candidates and no obvious way forward, except to go looking for a dark horse. That person would need the same profile as Pérez de Cuéllar: senior enough to be credible, unthreatening enough to attract no vetoes, and able to secure the political support of at least one state willing to nominate them on short notice. Whether such a figure exists and can be mobilized quickly enough, with the end of Guterres’s term on December 31st approaching, is far from certain.

New candidates could also enter the race before the straw polls begin. If one or two serious names join in the coming weeks, the dynamics could shift in one of two directions. A strong new entrant with broad cross-regional support and no vetoes from the permanent five could reshuffle the deck and resolve things quickly, producing early consensus. Alternatively, additional candidates could deepen the gridlock and still not survive the process. In this scenario, the Council could find itself in the fall with no viable candidate and no obvious next step—back to square one with the clock running.

The straw polls will unfold under four successive Council presidencies: the Democratic Republic of the Congo in July, Denmark in August, France in September, and Greece in October. Each will have a role in managing the process during what could be a critical and fast-moving period. The question is whether any of them are doing the kind of creative thinking that Otunnu did in 1981. That homework, done now and done quietly, may matter more than anything said at the dialogues last week.

There are three scenarios, then: a fast winner, a 1981 replay that forces a dark horse, or a collapsed field with the Council back at square one in the autumn. The conventional assumption is that the straw poll process will be slow and iterative, as it has been in the past. With this field, the opposite may be true. The race could end very fast, or it could go badly wrong very fast. Either way, the Council is unlikely to have the luxury of a long grinding process of elimination. There are simply not enough candidates for that.