Summary

  • PP-26 publishes several kinds of candidacy evidence: required individual-office dossiers, optional campaign material and regional lists of Council Member State candidates.
  • The later standardized written interviews apply to candidates for five management posts. They improve like-for-like visibility within each post, but do not turn the entire election into one comparable candidate file.

On the PP-26 Candidates page, a visitor can move from an individual seeking an elected management post to a set of country names competing for seats on the ITU Council. The design makes a large election easier to navigate. It also places records with different units, requirements and purposes beside one another.

That is not a defect by itself. A Secretary-General, a member of the Radio Regulations Board (RRB) and a Member State seeking a Council seat are not interchangeable candidates for one job. The trouble begins if a page that lists all of them is read as though it offers the same evidence about each one.

The official election procedures describe three broad kinds of contest. The Plenipotentiary Conference elects five management officials—the Secretary-General, Deputy Secretary-General and directors of the Radiocommunication, Telecommunication Standardization and Telecommunication Development Bureaux. It also elects 12 individual RRB members and 48 Member States to the next Council. They are conducted in the same conference, but the public records do not treat them as one office or one candidate pool.

For elected officials and RRB candidates, an Administration or Permanent Mission submits a candidature. The required package includes a photograph, curriculum vitae and vision statement. The ITU says the candidature is published on the candidate page after the materials arrive and an official conference document has been created. A Member State may also provide a brochure or campaign-video link. Those additions are optional. The rules prohibit ITU and conference logos in campaign materials because they could create the appearance of an official endorsement.

The Council section is different. It presents Member State candidatures by region. A State is not an individual applicant submitting a personal CV and vision statement for a job. The page’s different format therefore reflects a difference in what is being elected, rather than a missing executive-candidate file.

The distinction becomes more visible in the next disclosure step. After the candidature deadline on 12 October, the ITU editorial team plans to send written questions to candidates for the five management posts on 13 October. Each candidate may submit answers by 23 October. The questions are standardized within each post, but tailored by role: candidates for Secretary-General receive a different set from those for Deputy Secretary-General or a Bureau Director. Answers are capped at 1,000 words, may use any of ITU’s six official languages, and may not contain footnotes or hyperlinks.

Although the ITU labels the section “Candidate interviews,” the published process described here is a written question-and-answer exercise, not a live debate.

That is a meaningful comparison aid. A delegation weighing two candidates for the same post can read a structured response to a common role-specific set of questions, alongside the required CV and vision statement. But the written exercise is not described as a universal test. The published schedule does not include RRB or Council candidates, and it does not say that answers certify competence, determine eligibility or predict a ballot. They are a later, additional public record for five management races.

The candidate-interview page also makes clear that the answers remain future submissions as of 8 October. The page sets dates and editorial constraints; it does not prove that a candidate has accepted the invitation or filed a response. Nor should the live candidate page be mistaken for a final slate while the candidature window remains open.

Campaign-conduct guidance answers another question. The ethical guidelines, adopted by the Council in 2018 and re-endorsed in 2021 and 2025, focus primarily on candidates who already hold an ITU role. They address use of Union resources, campaign activity around official events and engagement with Member State representatives. The document says the Ethics Office can review draft material and advise on specific cases. These are guardrails on conduct and institutional resources; they are not a promise that every campaign artifact will be identical or a public rating of any candidate.

So the page is best understood as an index into unlike records. It helps users find official dossiers and optional material. The later interview cycle adds a limited, role-specific layer of comparable evidence. Neither step makes a campaign brochure an ITU statement, an unanswered question proof of a weakness, or a candidate's inclusion an institutional recommendation.

A useful improvement would preserve those distinctions while making them easier to see. For each office, the page could label which items are required and which optional, identify the submitting authority, state the language and publication date, and link each item to its official conference document. It could then add later interview responses as a separate, versioned record: same post, same question set, submission date, language and any correction or replacement. The Council section should remain a State-candidature record, not be padded with individual-style files that the rules do not require.

The closing date offers a natural point for such a snapshot. The PP-26 schedule sets 12 October for candidatures, the interview questions follow on 13 October, and answers are due on 23 October. A dated capture at each stage would let readers distinguish an open field from a closed one and a required dossier from an optional addition. It would also preserve what was publicly available before ballots begin on 12 November, without implying what delegations should conclude.

The goal is not to make every race look alike. It is to make the differences legible. A public page can be comprehensive as an index and still be incomplete as a comparison tool. PP-26’s interviews can strengthen the record for five management posts without becoming a universal scorecard. The institutional test is whether the source, status and scope of each piece of candidate information remain visible when readers use it to understand a consequential election.

Sources: ITU election procedures; PP-26 Candidates; candidate interviews and deadlines; ethical campaign guidelines; PP-26 key dates; ITU election-process backgrounder.