Tirana — The OSCE closed its twenty-seventh Ministerial Council on Friday with the appointment it had been unable to make for months: new leadership for the organisation’s four top posts, ending a vacancy crisis that had left the institution rudderless through one of the most turbulent years in its history.
Meeting online under Albania’s chairmanship because of the pandemic, the fifty-seven participating states confirmed Helga Maria Schmid, a senior German diplomat and former deputy EU foreign policy chief, as the new Secretary General. Matteo Mecacci, an Italian former parliamentarian and UN official, takes over ODIHR, the Warsaw-based election and human rights office; Kairat Abdrakhmanov of Kazakhstan becomes High Commissioner on National Minorities; and Teresa Ribeiro of Portugal becomes Representative on Freedom of the Media.
The four posts had been empty since July, when the mandates of the previous office-holders expired and a handful of states blocked their renewal. The standoff paralysed the organisation’s senior management through the Belarus crisis, the Nagorno-Karabakh war and a contested American election — precisely the moment, as more than one minister noted, when the OSCE could least afford it.
Ministers also settled the longer-term question of who steers the body next: Sweden takes the chair in 2021 as planned, followed by Poland in 2022 and — in a decision taken this week — North Macedonia in 2023. Chairmanships are usually agreed years in advance; the Skopje appointment restores a pipeline that had begun to fray under the same consensus disputes that emptied the top jobs.
What Tirana could not produce was much else. The meeting, Albania’s only ministerial as chair, ended without consensus on the major political files — Ukraine, the arms control vacuum, the frozen conflicts — and with the organisation’s budget still hostage to linked disputes. A leadership team, at least, now exists to inherit them.
Schmid takes office this month facing a familiar paradox: an organisation whose field missions, election observers and mediators are trusted precisely because its political decision-making is weak, and whose 57 states include several that would rather it did less. Her first job will be internal — persuading all of them that the OSCE is still worth paying for.
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