For most of its history, chess politics scandalized nobody. Officials argued about time controls, someone stormed out of a committee meeting in Lausanne, everyone went to dinner.
This 2026 FIDE election cycle has been correcting that at speed: as of Friday, the race has an actual leaked tape — a private conversation of Mark Glukhovsky, chess executive of long standing, secretly recorded in the Netherlands, chopped up, reassembled into something more useful, and published three weeks before the vote in Samarkand. Wiretaps! In chess! Real elections have these. Ours does now too.
The tape was evidently meant to pry Glukhovsky away from Uzbekistan, which is hosting both the Olympiad and the election.
On Monday he responded by doing two things no chess official has ever done in sequence: filing a criminal complaint with the Dutch police, and joining X — his first post ever. In it he declared his love for Uzbekistan and thanked the public.
The election is September 26.