The Council of Europe elected former Swiss president Alain Berset as its next secretary general on Tuesday evening.
The Strasbourg-based human rights organization’s 306-member parliament held a secret ballot in two rounds on Tuesday. Berset won the second round with 114 votes in favor on Tuesday afternoon.
Former Estonian culture minister Indrek Saar received 85 votes in the second round and Belgian candidate Didier Reynders came third with 46 votes, politico.eu reports.
The Council of Europe has 46 member countries and includes the European Court of Human Rights. It is an independent body, separate from the European Union. Its general secretary is elected for five years.
As politico.eu writes, the loss of Reynders is a big setback for the liberal Belgian politician, who ran to lead the Council of Europe already in 2019, but lost that race as well.
He is expected to return to the European Commission as chief justice by the autumn, but it is unclear where he will go next amid a European Union review of the Commission’s next term.
The new secretary Alanin Berset is expected to start work in September.
He is a member of the Social Democrats and served as president of Switzerland in 2018 and again in 2023. He was minister of health and interior during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He announced that he would step down as president in June 2023, adding at the time that he had no concrete plans for what would happen next.
The current secretary general, former Croatian foreign minister Marija Pejčinović Burič, did not run for a second term.
