BLATTER WINS 5th TERM AS FIFA BOSS
SHAKES OFF SCANDAL, SOLE RIVAL PULLS OUT
Sepp Blatter concluded a difficult week by handily winning a fifth term as president of world soccer’s governing body Friday, beating Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan in a vote of the body’s member organizations.
Blatter soundly defeated Ali in the first round of voting, 133-73, but fell just short of the percentage needed for re-election. But Ali conceded just as the election was headed to a second ballot.
The announcement came after a prolonged voting period in which a member of each delegation was called to the front of the arena in alphabetical order by delegation to cast a ballot in one of two boxy white voting booths. The process took more than an hour.
Blatter, one of the most powerful people in sports, has run FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, as an autocracy since winning the presidency in 1998. He was expected to defeat Ali despite the allegations of criminal behavior that have engulfed his organization this week. The vote took place only miles from the luxury hotel where several top FIFA officials were arrested Wednesday on corruption charges brought by the United States.
For years, FIFA’s membership has largely operated in lock step under Blatter as he weathered numerous controversies — corruption, bribery, match-fixing and others -—and rarely showed any sign of vulnerability. In the previous two presidential races, he ran unopposed. The federal charges this week against some of his top officials were considered an international embarrassment, but hardly a threat to his power.
The FIFA president is elected by a one-country, one-vote poll of its 209 member federations, making the many smaller countries who support Blatter an effective counterweight to his unpopularity elsewhere, most notably in Europe. Blatter, who was not directly implicated in the indictment or in a separate investigation announced by Swiss authorities into the 2010 voting that awarded the next two World Cups, said in a speech before the vote Friday: “I am being held accountable for the current storm. OK, so be it. I will shoulder it.”