'MUNGA' Movement Reshapes Race for Next UN Secretary-General
A former African head of state with explicit backing for Donald Trump's foreign policy has emerged as a leading candidate to succeed António Guterres at the United Nations, turning the 2027 succession contest into a referendum on…
HONG KONG— June 25, 2026
A former African head of state with explicit backing for Donald Trump's foreign policy has emerged as a leading candidate to succeed António Guterres at the United Nations, turning the 2027 succession contest into a referendum on institutional accountability and multilateral spending efficiency. Macky Sall, who served as president of Senegal for 12 years, is positioning himself as the reform candidate best placed to restructure a body that Washington — the organisation's largest funder — has openly questioned.
Sall Channels Trump Playbook on UN Reform
Sall's pitch draws directly from the political vocabulary of the Trump administration. In an interview with Breitbart News, the former Senegalese president — who also served as president of the African Union from 2022 to 2023 — described Trump as "a peace builder" and called on the United States to remain engaged with the UN, arguing that Washington is "the first power in the world to be with the UN." He invoked the acronym MUNGA — Make the UN Great Again — framing his candidacy around cutting waste and improving operational efficiency at a body he says he has watched mismanage resources firsthand across Africa.
The MUNGA slogan was originally coined by Mike Waltz, Trump's UN ambassador, and has since become a recurring rallying cry inside the organisation, according to Hugh Dugan, a former U.S. delegate to the UN who advised 11 U.S. ambassadors over 26 years of service. Dugan, who served on the National Security Council during Trump's first term and now leads Multilateral Accountability Associates, said the slogan has tapped into longstanding frustration among member states over bureaucratic paralysis and the UN's failure to fulfil its core mandates on peace, security, and international cooperation.
Funding Signal Complicates Narrative of U.S. Disengagement
Despite persistent reports of Washington distancing itself from multilateral institutions, Dugan pushed back on that characterisation. He pointed to Trump's decision to resume $1.8 billion in U.S. funding to the UN's humanitarian operations as evidence that the administration remains strategically engaged rather than withdrawing. The funding signal matters for positioning: it suggests Washington is betting on reform from within rather than defunding as leverage.
Guterres, the current secretary-general and a former prime minister of Portugal, took office in 2017 and is due to leave in 2027. His tenure has spanned the COVID-19 pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — crises that exposed the limits of the UN's crisis-response architecture.
Geopolitical Arithmetic of the P5 Veto
Any successor must clear the veto threshold of all five permanent Security Council members — the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom. Sall is explicitly pitching himself as a bridge candidate, arguing his experience governing across African, Western, and Eastern diplomatic relationships makes him uniquely positioned to assemble that coalition. Whether Beijing and Moscow view a Trump-adjacent reformer as an asset or a liability will be the defining variable.
Dugan framed the selection bluntly: the outcome will determine whether the UN's institutional culture answers to its member states or operates, in his words, as its own "deep state" of entitled bureaucrats insulated from the accountability pressures that govern any other large organisation.
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