admin
Fifa presidential favourites Gianni Infantino and Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa embarked on a final scramble for votes yesterday ahead of the election to lead world football’s scandal-tainted governing body.
The poll is seen as crucial to repairing the organisation’s reputation, which has been battered by a series of unprecedented corruption scandals, but just two days before the vote, protests over the secrecy of ballots have mounted.
Front-runners Infantino — the Swiss-Italian acting chief of European football — and Sheikh Salman of Bahrain, Asian football’s president, have so far stayed clear of the controversy over balloting.
Both were in Fifa’s home city of Zurich trying to assemble the coalition of supporters needed to replace the disgraced Sepp Blatter and win the most powerful job in world football.
But rival candidate Prince Ali bin al Hussein of Jordan had appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to suspend tomorrow’s election. He had said transparent voting booths must be used to ensure that delegates do not take pictures of their ballots, a move required by certain regional confederations as proof of loyalty to a specific candidate, according Prince Ali.
“I want this election to occur as soon as possible, but not at the risk of undermining its integrity,” the Jordanian royal said in a letter to Fifa’s member associations. Jerome Champagne of France, who along with South Africa’s Tokyo Sexwale rounds out the list of five presidential challengers, has joined the Jordanian prince’s call for greater transparency. It was Platini’s sudden and dramatic downfall that threw the race wide-open and led Infantino, his deputy at European confederation Uefa to enter the race.
While the hotly contested election remains too close to call, the two-thirds majority needed to secure a first-round victory seems unlikely for any candidate, meaning the poll could go to at least two rounds of voting.
Only a simple majority is required to win from the second round. Fifa has 209 national associations, but currently only 207 are approved to vote, following the suspensions of Kuwait and Indonesia, although both countries could be cleared to participate tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Sepp Blatter and Platini have had their bans from football reduced from eight to six years by the Fifa appeal committee. They were banned in December after Fifa president Blatter authorised a payment of 2 million Swiss francs to Uefa president Platini in 2011. Fifa says “the Appeal Committee considered that Platini’s and Blatter’s activities and the services they had rendered to Fifa, Uefa and football in general over the years should deserve appropriate recognition as a mitigating factor.” — AP-AFP
derick.khumalo