Turlov Wins FIDE Presidency
By Dougas C. · Sat, 26 Sep 2026
Timur Turlov is the next president of FIDE. In Saturday's runoff in Samarkand, delegates gave him 110 votes to Wadim Rosenstein's 85.
Timur Turlov is the next president of FIDE. In Saturday's runoff in Samarkand, delegates gave him 110 votes to Wadim Rosenstein's 85, a decisive margin that leaves little room to argue the first round's result was close to reversible. Turlov entered the runoff with a 20-vote lead over Rosenstein and came out of it with a 25-vote win, meaning he didn't just hold his coalition together, he grew it, picking up more of the Buettner-Pein bloc's support than Rosenstein managed.It's the outcome the pre-election polling had pointed to for weeks, ever since Turlov effectively inherited the top line of what had been Arkady Dvorkovich's re-election operation after Dvorkovich's EU sanctions listing forced him out of the race entirely. What started as an accident of timing three and a half weeks ago is now a four-year mandate.A win built on money and reach, not consensusTurlov's path to the presidency ran through exactly the assets his campaign always leaned on: Freedom Holding's balance sheet, the Kazakhstan federation's results under his watch, and an organizational footprint, through the International School Chess Federation and a run of FIDE-branded events across multiple continents, that reached federations most candidates never get in front of. Whether that footprint translated into votes through persuasion or through the kind of hospitality-heavy convenience this outlet and others have documented around ISCF-run tournaments is a question that will follow him into office rather than get resolved by the vote count.Rosenstein's 85 votes represent a real base, larger than the 76 he carried into the runoff, but not enough to close a gap that was always going to require near-total consolidation of Buettner and Pein's departed voters plus a meaningful defection from Turlov's side. His campaign leaned on a different pitch in its final days, including the ten million euro federation investment pledge and the message he gave El País earlier in the week about professionalizing chess management and making the game accessible. It was enough to keep the race competitive through two rounds. It wasn't enough to win one.What Turlov inheritsThe presidency Turlov takes over is not a clean slate. He arrives with the unresolved regulatory questions around Freedom Finance still on the record, an ISCF structure that critics say operates without visible governance, and a communications operation, run by Freedom's Bulat Latypov, that has already shown a willingness to threaten legal action against journalists rather than answer their questions. He also arrives in the middle of an Olympiad that has had its own share of controversies this fortnight, from the Yom Kippur scheduling failure that cost Israel forfeited points to the death of longtime FIDE Vice President Georgios Makropoulos, whose loss the congress marked with a moment of silence before any of this voting took place.None of that changes what happened on Saturday. Delegates had a choice between two very different visions of how FIDE should be run, and by a comfortable margin, they chose Turlov's. What he does with the mandate, and how he answers the questions still trailing his campaign, starts now.