On the back of all the Mohammed Ben Sulayem discussions going on, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why it’s likely that he will win reelection when the FIA Presidential elections happen in December 2025.
Besides MBS running unopposed so far, let’s talk a bit about how the elections work.
When the FIA members vote, they don’t vote for the President alone – they vote for a list containing:
– The President of the FIA
– The President of the Senate
– The Deputy President for Automobile Mobility and Tourism
– The Deputy President of Sport
– 7 vice presidents of the FIA: Middle East and North Africa, Africa, North America, South America, Asia-Pacific and two for Europe
The list is put together by the person running for President, and with so many positions they can fill, it’s relatively easy to select people who hold significant power over a number of voting members.
Another factor is weighted voting. The way the FIA is structured, each member nation gets 24 votes total. 12 for Sporting Members and 12 for Mobility Members.
If a member nation only has one organisation representing both sport and mobility, they control all 24 votes.
If a member nation has multiple organisations representing various areas, they split the votes.
So, for example Gabon controls 24 votes. As does Andorra, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Libya, etc.
In contrast Motorsport UK controls 12 votes, despite being one of the largest motorsports organisations in the world, because they share the 24 total national votes with The Royal Automobile Club (6 votes) and IAM Roadsmart (6 votes).
The voting weights from the 2021 election which put MBS in office can be found here.
This essentially means, that the more popular motorsports and motoring are in a given nation, the more fractured the voting power of the organisations in said nation becomes.
This makes the small members relatively more powerful in elections – and it means that a President could potentially buy an election, by promising to support the small organisations, either financially or by promising positions in the FIA.
An example of this, is Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s “President’s Fund”, which was a $1.5 million fund, that distributed money to the member organisations that voted for him.
That fund was being investigated by the audit committee.
MBS fired the Head of the Committee, Bertrand Badre and Committee Member Tom Purves, and now he has proposed a change to the rules, giving him even more control of this and the Ethics Committee – which also investigated MBS, and where he fired Compliance Officer Paolo Basarri.
