Egyptian candidate to lead the WTO seeks to return negotiating power to the organization

Egypt's Abdel-Hamid Mamdouh, one of the candidates to head the World Trade Organization (WTO), said his priority if elected would be to rebuild the organization's negotiating role, which has failed to achieve major trade agreements among its members for nearly a decade.

"We need to work together, with less politicization, in a less emotional way and with more confidence," said the Egyptian lawyer at a press conference to explain the reasons for his candidacy for a post that Brazil's Roberto Azevedo will be leaving on Aug. 31.

Mamdouh presents as one of his main guarantees his long experience in the WTO, since he worked almost 35 years in this organism and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), participating actively in the Uruguay Round, the negotiation that meant the transition from one to the other.

"The director-general is not a traditional executive post, his main role is that of a mediator, a bridge-builder, and for that he must have a deep knowledge of the WTO and experience in how the international trade system works," he argued.

The Egyptian candidate stressed that the current deadlock in the WTO, both in trade negotiations and in its dispute settlement system, shows the need to reform the institution, which would mean "not changing the institution, but the treaty signed between its members as sovereign countries".

The deadline for submission of candidates began on 8 June, will end one month later and five candidates have already been formalised: Mamdouh, Mexico's Jesus Seade, Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Moldova's Tudor Ulianovschi and South Korea's Yoo Myung-hee.

The Egyptian lawyer stressed that Africa had been negotiating a consensus candidate supported by the entire continent, and he had been one of the pre-candidates approved by the African Union, but Nigeria had dispensed with that process by surprisingly presenting its former finance and foreign minister.

"I don't think it's necessarily a problem, although perhaps an African candidate would have been better," he said of an election process that had to be accelerated because of Azevedo's decision to leave office a year before the end of his term.

Mamdouh did not comment on the possibility of the European Union presenting its own candidate, although names such as the European Commissioner for Trade, Phil Hogan, or the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, are mentioned in the specialised press.

Of the possible Spanish candidate, also with a long experience in the WTO (she directed until the beginning of this year the International Trade Centre, a bridge institution between the organism and the United Nations), the Egyptian said "I have a lot of respect for her". "We worked together when she was the chief of staff of Pascal Lamy (Azevedo's predecessor in the WTO's directorate general) and I have good memories of that collaboration," he said.

The race to lead the WTO comes at a complicated time, both because of the crisis generated by COVID-19 (which will make direct contacts between candidates and the agency's leadership difficult) and because of the organization's internal problems, which could have precipitated Azevedo's departure.

Trade tensions between China and the US, the collapse of trade and the rise of protectionism expected as a result of the health crisis, and Washington's criticism of an organisation it considers excessively politicised are some of the factors that explain the WTO's difficult moment.