António Guterres, Known for Nerve and Deal Making, Will Need Both at U.N.

UNITED NATIONS — Kenya was seething. In the spring of 2015, its leaders complained that a wave of terrorist attacks had been planned in a refugee camp for Somalis. Shut it down, Kenya demanded of the United Nations refugee agency — or we will shut it down for you and send the Somalis packing.

The man in charge of protecting the world’s refugees at the time, António Guterres, shuttled from his headquarters in Geneva to Mogadishu to meet with the Somali president, to Nairobi to meet with the Kenyan president, and on to the refugee camp, Dadaab.

His diplomacy led to a deal to keep the camp open, send home only those Somalis who wanted to return, and rally more international aid for Somalia and Kenya.

It was not a perfect deal, said Bill Frelick, the refugees expert at Human Rights Watch, but Mr. Guterres contained a potentially explosive situation — at least for a while.

“He was managing a very politicized situation with a lot of raw nerves,” he said.

Many raw-nerve reckonings are sure to confront Mr. Guterres when he takes over as the United Nations secretary general in January for a five-year term. The 15-member Security Council picked him last week, and the General Assembly unanimously approved the choice on Thursday.

Mr. Guterres’s predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, who spoke to the General Assembly after the vote, called him “perhaps best known where it counts most: on the front lines of armed conflict and humanitarian suffering.”

Speaking to the General Assembly, Mr. Guterres acknowledged the challenges that he will face in bringing world powers together on the most pressing war and peace issues, starting with Syria.

“Whatever divisions might exist, now it’s more important to unite,” he said.

Mr. Guterres will take over at a time when the credibility of the United Nations is under intense scrutiny, and when the chasm between Russia and the West raises the specter of what Mr. Ban calls “Cold War ghosts.”

An engineer by training and a Catholic by conviction, Mr. Guterres, 67, of Portugal, has described himself as “an honest broker.” He has said that as secretary general, he will embody “those truly universal values that are enshrined in the U.N. charter.” But he also repeatedly cites the need for what he calls “discreet diplomacy.”

Those who have worked closely with him often cite his political savvy. As prime minister of Portugal in the late 1990s, he pushed through spending cuts necessary for the country to adopt the common European currency. He negotiated the transfer of Macau, which had been a Portuguese colony, to Chinese control. As the chief of the perennially cash-short refugee agency from 2005 to 2015, he traveled constantly, cultivating the trust of leaders in both countries that host refugees and those that pay for them.

Critics say Mr. Guterres’s penchant for deal-making has constrained him, especially when trying to persuade powerful countries he depended upon for financial support.

Shortly after Mr. Guterres returned from Dadaab in 2015, Doctors Without Borders accused the refugee agency and European governments of an “overwhelming failure” to aid and protect the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were pouring into Europe.

At the time, Mr. Guterres’s agency neither stepped up its operations to manage the dirty, chaotic tent cities that had mushroomed in Greece, nor could it protect refugees as they made their way across the Continent, braving razor fences and water cannons.

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Arjan Hehenkamp, the head of the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders, said Mr. Guterres could have pushed the world’s richest and most powerful countries, including the United States, to respond more robustly and take in many more people fleeing the world’s deadliest battlefields.

“I felt he was doing mainly what was feasible, trying hard to strike bilateral deals with specific countries to keep their borders open,” Mr. Hehenkamp said. “He should have, in my opinion, demanded the world to do what was necessary instead.”

The refugee agency spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming, who worked with Mr. Guterres for seven years, said he was reluctant to spend the agency’s limited resources to help wealthy nations manage refugees on their territory. “This is Europe,” she recalled him saying. “We work in countries that don’t have the means.”

Born in 1949, Mr. Guterres studied engineering and taught briefly while he was in graduate school.

He found his calling, though, when he began volunteering in a Lisbon slum. He joined the protests that led to the overthrow of the authoritarian government in 1974. He helped found his country’s Socialist Party and became its leader. He added a red rose to the party’s clenched-fist logo, in a bid to recast it as less militant.

Mr. Guterres extols the gender quotas his party adopted in the early 1990s to promote women in the party. He does this to underscore what he calls his commitment to women’s rights, and he has promised gender parity in senior United Nations appointments.

As prime minister between 1995 and 2001, he earned a reputation as “a skilled negotiator,” according to a former minister in his government, Joao Cravinho, who credited him for reaching agreements with the right and left at a time when his own party did not have a parliamentary majority.

One of his signature measures was to decriminalize drug use, in response to a surge in heroin addiction in Portugal. Less successful was his party’s effort to loosen curbs on abortion. A majority of the Socialist Party favored the move, though Mr. Guterres said that, as a Catholic, he opposed it. The law was abandoned after an unsuccessful referendum.

In 2005, he was named the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.

His mathematical thinking never quite left him. Once, during a visit with refugee children in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, he started teaching a math class, his former spokeswoman, Ms. Fleming, recalled.

T. Alex Aleinikoff, an American law professor who served as his deputy, only half-jokingly referred to Mr. Guterres as the guy with the accountant’s green eye shade, poring over agency budgets. Usually, he found a mistake.

During Mr. Guterres’s tenure, the refugee agency’s budget grew sharply, though still short of what it needed to assist the record numbers of displaced people worldwide. In a nod to donors, Mr. Guterres moved agency staff members around, slashing the head count at its headquarters in Geneva and adding more personnel in field offices.

“He understands things politically as much as operationally,” Mr. Aleinikoff said.

Raw nerves are often hard to overcome in diplomacy. In recent months, Kenya has sought to send refugees back to Somalia, and again revived its demands to close the Dadaab camp. And the European Union earlier this year entered into a widely criticized deal with Turkey, promising billions in aid in exchange for keeping refugees from crossing the Mediterranean.

Mr. Guterres inherits challenges that will test his ability to balance the demands of the world’s most powerful countries with the needs of the world’s most vulnerable people — starting, no doubt, with the wars in Syria and Yemen.

He once referred to a lesson learned from his late first wife, a psychoanalyst. When two people meet, she told him, there are at least six perceptions to manage: how they perceive themselves, how they think the other perceives them, and how the two perceive each other.

Mr. Guterres said that the lesson applied to countries, too, and that his role was helping them see through the thicket.

“I don’t see myself as a threat,” he said.