2018 FIDE Elections
Kirsan enroute to BIG win in October!
You have to hand it to the man! He has managed to out-finesse each and every of his political rivals since first taking control of FIDE back in November 1995 in Paris.
Today it very much seems that he is going to be the big favourite , once more, at the FIDE elections to be held during the Chess Olympiad in Batumi, Georgia. According to my own research figures, Kirsan is heading towards a 70% support level, sweeping almost all of Asia and Africa, revealing a new strategy that anticipates that his support in the Americas might decline to 50%. Europe’s vote will be , like in the past , irrelevant, once all the votes are counted. And the FIDE bank account will be moved out of Europe once and for all.
Ilyumzhinov believes he has recently become the political target of past rivals (Kasparov, Rex Sinquefield and Bessel Kok) who have convinced the US to place him on the sanctions list.
Whether this is true or not, Kirsan’s popularity in the chess world has infact increased. Chess players love underdogs! The recent successful legal cases against MSM outlets for glibly insinuating that Kirsan had done anything illegal or improper (the facile explanation for the sanctions in the first instance) has not gone unnoticed.
It is also worth recalling that FIDE is not being sanctioned, nor is it under investigation in any way, and that Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was democratically elected by an overwhelming majority in 2014.
It is Kirsan’s political rivals who want to paint a very different picture, one that insinuates guilt and shame on behalf of the President for being on the US sanctions list. Despite these sanctions being considered illegal by the majority of legal minds in the free world.
Further, the FIDE presidential board has strategically refused to move the FIDE bank account to another country outside of Europe, in anticipation of fooling the FIDE electorate in October with some nonsense about the impossibility of banking in europe while Kirsan is FIDE president. But since when is FIDE about banking?
It is curious that while all of the recent FIDE presidential board drama has unfolded, not a single top player has voiced any criticism of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, or expressed any public opinion to support Makro and gang. Only the right-wing chess media (Chess.com, ChessBase, ChessDom, etc) have expressed any support for Makro.
From what I have been able to find out, most top players believe that Kirsan will be re-elected, and by a large margin, regardless of who runs against him. Once more, it seems, there is a large divide in the chess community and its self-elected ‘journalists’!
To be continued…(probably tomorrow or this weekend, when there should be some news coming out of Moscow)