The slate of candidates for the top offices of the World Chess Federation were officially announced Tuesday. They are on the Web site of the federation, which is also known by the acronym FIDE (for Fédération Internationale des Échecs).

The ticket of the incumbent president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, includes Georgios Makropoulos of Greece, who is running for deputy president; Lewis Ncube of Zambia, for vice president; Beatriz Marinello, who is a United States citizen, but did not receive the endorsement of the United States Chess Federation, and is therefore running as a nominee of Chile, her native country, and Brazil, for vice president; Ignatius Leong of Singapore for general secretary; and Nigel Freeman of Bermuda, for treasurer.

The ticket of Anatoly Karpov, the former world champion, who is running to replace Ilyumzhinov, includes Richard Conn Jr. of the United States, for deputy president; Aguinaldo Jaime of Angola, for vice president; Alica Maric of Serbia, for vice president; Abd Hamid Majid of Malaysia, for general secretary; and Viktor Kapustin of Ukraine, for treasurer.

Since each country in the federation has one vote, courting each and every country is important. In the race to secure as many endorsements as possible, Ilyumzhinov may be gaining the upper hand. On his campaign Web site, he now says he has 55 countries who will vote for him. As there are about 170 countries, he seems to be getting closer to a majority.

Of course, the voting will not occur until September at the Chess Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, and voters can change their minds. But, from Karpov’s perspective, there has been one ominous development: Ilyumzhinov seems to have won the endorsement of the Russian Chess Federation.

The Russian federation’s endorsement is, in many ways, symbolic, but Ilyumzhinov and Karpov are Russian and they wanted the backing of their home country. Last month, the fight reached its zenith when a majority of the federation voted to endorse Karpov, a move that many found surprising, as Ilyumzhinov, the president of an impoverished Russian republic called Kalmykia, was assumed to have the political muscle to win the federation’s backing.

It turned out that that assumption may have been right. In a move that stunned even veterans of Russian politics, the federation was taken over a week later by Arkady V. Dvorkovich, a senior Kremlin advisor, who is also head of the federation’s supervisory board. Dvorkovich barred the head of the federation, Alexander Bakh, from the federation’s offices and decreed that the vote to endorse Karpov was illegitimate.

Nominally, that still left up in the air who the federation would support.

In yesterday’s press release by FIDE about the candidates, the other shoe dropped.

At the bottom of the release were several letters in Russian and English signed by Dvorkovich. In them, he said that Bakh had submitted his resignation, effective July 10, and that a letter from him on June 23 announcing that the Russian federation was endorsing Karpov was not authorized. Dvorkovich also sent the minutes of a meeting on June 28 at which a quorum of 17 of the 32 members of the federation voted to give Dvorkovich sole authority to act on the federation’s behalf until a new meeting can be called in October — after the FIDE elections. Dvorkovich then reaffirmed an earlier letter he sent to FIDE in April endorsing Ilyumzhinov for president.

While Karpov may face an uphill race for the presidency, he certainly has managed to raise his public profile. While he was in New York on May 17 to raise money for his campaign, he did a video interview with the Web site Big Think.

Chessbase also has a transcript of the interview.