His comments were in part a reference to the fact that there is a growing feeling among some countries that the next secretary-general should be a woman, and from Eastern Europe.
“It is not easy,” Guterres told journalists after a ceremony in Lisbon at which he was decorated by Portugal’s president. “There is a range of complex circumstances surrounding this election, but I think that it is my duty to be available.”
Guterres, who was the UN’s high commissioner for refugees until the end of last year, was on Tuesday awarded the Grand Cross of Portugal’s Order of Liberty by the president Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who said the former Socialist prime minister “unquestionably” has what it takes to be UN secretary-general.
“ António Guterres left a legacy (…) that means today he is a respected voice and all the world listens to him”, Aníbal Cavaco Silva said at a ceremony to present the former prime minister, António Guterres, with the ‘Grã-Cruz da Ordem da Liberdade’ award.
Underlining that the award was attributed in recognition of “a life path that has been of prestige to Portugal”, Cavaco Silva also recognised the challenges that António Guterres now faces and considered the former prime minister has the profile to take over at the highest position in the United Nations’ system.
Officials have not yet begun putting out feelers as to which countries might support him as a candidate, “with two or three small exceptions”, Guterres said. He added that his main concern was that in Portugal his bid might not be seen as involving various political forces and institutions, but as a personal one, or only backed by the current Socialist government.
On his decade as high commissioner for refugees, Guterres said he stepped down in “great disappointment” at the fact that Europe had been unable to unite and organise to rise to the challenge of the refugee crisis, despite some “enormous manifestations of solidarity”.
It was, he added, “profoundly comforting” to return to Portugal, which he described as an “extraordinary example” of “a country without fears, a country without anxieties, a country where there may be social expressions of xenophobia here and there, but where xenophobia has never had a political expression and where no election was focussed on immigration questions where being xenophobic and populist has never brought anyone votes.”
The fact that the 1974 Revolution had been virtually bloodless and that the state was reformed without its being destroyed was he argued, particularly important.
“We see much richer states than ours where intolerance, fears, anxieties and sometimes even expressions of xenophobia proliferate and where there is something of a search for illusory identities lost in the past,” he said. “At times it reminds one of the tragic memory of the campaigns for the purity of the race of several decades ago.”
The president of Portugal said on Tuesday that the legacy António Guterres left at the United Nations in the way he performed the role of High Commissioner for Refugees, meant he “unquestionably had the profile” to be the organisation’s secretary general.