Four Days in Autumn

With only four days left before knowing who will be the President of FIDE, it can be worth reading Leonard Barden’s “pre—exit polls”, so as he summed up it in his The Guardian weekly chess column. First of all, the sword of Damocles of FIDE Ethics Commission over the electoral process: “The bitter war of words between Greece’s Georgios Makropoulos, the current deputy FIDE president, and Arkady Dvorkovich, Russia’s former deputy prime minister and chief FIFA World Cup organiser, has spilled over to the FIDE Ethics Committee before the FIDE presidential election on 3 October”. Then Barden scans the respective odds of the three candidates, starting with Nigel David Short, whose anti-corruption program has been undermined at the root by two heavy rejections: “First, an English Chess Federation board meeting announced that its vote would go to Makropoulos, whose No. 2 is the ECF’s international director, Malcolm Pein, already a candidate for FIDE president in 2022”, Barden writes. Secondly and lastly, he concludes, “both Makropoulos, who is probably the narrow favourite, and Dvorkovich, but not Short, have been allocated booths at the Olympiad Expo”. And yet, a ChessBase reader poll shows that Short just leads by a huge margin the race as the most welcomed FIDE President, probably because he succeeded in not being seen as the continuation of the war by other masks. But alas for him people cannot vote at FIDE presidential election. What people can still do is to insist on their own national federations’ officials to represent them — the people — faithfully and truly.