UN leadership extends 'warmest congratulations' to Biden & Harris for 'historic election'

As Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is declared as the projected winner of the US election 2020, top United Nations leadership hailed his running mate Kamala Harris as America’s Black and South Asian-descent woman Vice President and applauded her for breaking “yet another ceiling”. Leaders including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and President of the 75th session of the UNGA Volkan Bozkir congratulated Biden and Harris and said that they look forward to deepening UN-US ties. 

Guterres’ spokesman Phane Dujarric said that the UN Secretary-General is always pleased and “always welcomes any instance where women leaders.. where a woman gets to break” a new or “yet another ceiling”. Guterres, in a statement, also congratulated the American people for the vibrant exercise of democracy in their country’s elections last week. The UN spokesperson said, “He congratulates the President-elect and Vice President-elect and reaffirms that the partnership between the United States and the United Nations is an essential pillar of the international cooperation needed to address the dramatic challenges facing the world today”. 

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In a tweet, Bozkir and head of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka also congratulated Biden and Harris. While Bozkir extended “warmest congratulations,” Ngcuka described the prospect of having the first-ever woman as vice president as “a hugely uplifting moment”. Ngcuka also said that “Generation equality calls for more women in leadership”. 

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‘US leadership more crucial than ever’

While comments by Bozkir and Guterres were the first reactions from the world organisation’s top leadership to the election victory, Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Audrey Azoulay and Head of the UN refugee agency UNHCR Filippo Grandi also congratulated the pair. Azoulay called for a “renewed commitment from the US,” while Grandi said that “US leadership is more crucial than ever”. António Vitorino, the Director-General of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said on Twitter that the UN migration agency was looking forward to working with the new administration. 

 
Meanwhile, the Associated Press called the Democratic Challenger as the winner with a clear majority of 290 electoral votes as opposed to 214 for the Republican leader. Evidently angered by the outcome, while the US President has been on a Twitter spree questioning who allowed the media outlets to declare a winner, his reelection campaign is reportedly planning a messaging blitz to fuel its argument without any evidence that the US Election 2020 is ‘stolen’. Donald Trump's campaign has filed several lawsuits against the election results in a few battleground states, while the President had spent months making unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots could open the election up to fraud.

(With inputs from PTI) 

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