Chess Has a Presidential Election Coming Up. The Fight Is Also About Russia's Place in Global Sport

For the first time in eight years, a Russian candidate is not on the ballot to lead world chess. That's not spin. That's what happens when the European Union sanctions your incumbent president in the middle of his own re-election campaign.

Chess's governing body, FIDE, votes for its next president this weekend in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and the story behind that vote says as much about global politics as it does about the game itself.

How the incumbent disappeared from his own election

Arkady Dvorkovich, a former Russian deputy prime minister, has led FIDE since 2018 and was widely expected to seek a third consecutive term after the organization scrapped its two-term limit, a rule Dvorkovich himself had introduced as an election promise when he first ran. Then, this July, the EU added him to an expanded sanctions list targeting dozens of individuals and entities connected to Russia. Dvorkovich suspended his own presidential duties in response, and five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand stepped in as interim president.

That's a genuinely unusual sequence for any sporting federation, let alone one that likes to present itself as politically neutral. The sitting president of world chess was effectively removed from his own office by an external sanctions regime, mid-term, without any internal vote forcing him out.

Three tickets, zero incumbents

What's left on the ballot reflects that vacuum. Timur Turlov, president of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation, is running with Anand himself as his vice presidential candidate, an unusually direct signal that the man who held the office on an interim basis is now backing a specific successor. German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buttner is running alongside British chess official Malcolm Pein. Entrepreneur Wadim Rosenstein rounds out the field, paired with Singaporean businessman Gordon Tang.

None of the three tickets includes a Russian candidate at the top, a genuine first since Dvorkovich's original 2018 campaign reshaped FIDE's leadership. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the Russian who ran the federation from 1995 to 2018 and had reportedly been building support across Africa for a comeback bid, didn't make it onto the final list of approved candidacies at all.

Why this matters beyond chess

Each of FIDE's roughly 200 member federations gets one vote regardless of population or chess strength, a structure that makes the organization genuinely global in a way few sporting bodies can claim. That same structure is exactly what made it valuable for a country to control in the first place: one vote from a small federation counts the same as one from a chess powerhouse, which means influence in FIDE has always been about relationships and patronage as much as playing strength.

Russia's sudden, sanctions-driven absence from the top of the ballot doesn't mean Russian influence has vanished from the sport entirely. It means, for one election cycle at least, the fight for who controls it is happening somewhere else.

When a sanctions regime effectively removes a sitting sports federation president from his own re-election campaign, does that count as the outside world protecting international sport's integrity, or as politics reaching further into a supposedly neutral game than it probably should?