FIFA reaffirms support for Infantino amid calls for resignation
FIFA’s President Is Not a Monarch
When a leader claims a democratic mandate yet bristles at being judged by those who granted it, the trust that makes authority legitimate begins to fray.
The affair now agitating world football turns on a simple question: what sort of power does the president of FIFA hold? We are told he was “democratically elected” by 211 member associations, that he “continues to serve with their mandate,” and that some confederations “unanimously back” him. We are also told that UEFA has lost confidence, that the Norwegian federation’s president declares he lacks the institutional trust required to govern, and that calls for his resignation are abroad. Between these two tales stands FIFA’s own voice, decrying a “concerted effort” to undermine its president, promising to challenge “inaccurate or misleading” reporting “directly and vigorously,” and warning against removal by any means but its “established democratic processes.”
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right of making laws and penalties only for the public good, I meant to bind all wielders of common authority, however chosen. Election by many hands does not license one to rule as if his will were the law; it creates a fiduciary trust, revocable when the ends for which it was granted are manifestly neglected or opposed. FIFA, though not a commonwealth in the strict sense, plainly exercises something like political power: it makes rules, awards and withholds great advantages, and governs a vast civil interest. Its president is therefore no more than a trustee for the associations, who themselves represent countless players and supporters. Consent made him; consent unmade would be no usurpation, but the execution of the original bargain.
Two claims now contend. First, that the president retains his mandate because the 211 associations have not, in formal vote, withdrawn it, and because certain powerful blocs declare unanimous support. Secondly, that he has lost the “institutional trust required to govern,” at least in the eyes of important confederations, and that therefore he ought to resign. Here reason requires that we distinguish three things: mismanagement, breach of trust, and usurpation. FIFA has apologized for “mistakes in the handling” of a World Cup spinoff proposal, involving very great sums. Mistake, even costly, is not yet breach. Breach appears when a governor uses the power committed to him, not for the public good of the association, but for his own private interests or a faction’s, and persists in it against warning.
About this crucial point, the public record in this dispute is notably thin. There are allusions to allegations, insinuations, and what FIFA calls “misinformation,” as well as to private conduct reported elsewhere, but no full and impartial account here of facts that would amount to “a long train of abuses, all tending the same way,” by which I have elsewhere said a design to subvert a constitution may be fairly inferred. Some member bodies may well possess such materials; if so, their duty is not merely to murmur of lost confidence, but to lay evidence plainly before those whose consent created this office. To demand resignation without making out the case is to ask the world to trust their trust, rather than to see for itself.
Yet those who now speak in FIFA’s name are not free of their own temptations. When an institution declares that those who lack majority support “should not seek to achieve through allegation, insinuation or misinformation what they cannot achieve through established democratic processes,” it speaks a half-truth. It is right that removal follow known rules, not secret cabals. But it is wrong, and dangerous, to suggest that public accusation is itself a kind of rebellion, to be “no longer tolerated.” In every free society, men must be at liberty to question their governors’ actions, to investigate, to publish, even to err, so long as they answer for defamation before an impartial judge. If those in power may label all unwelcome scrutiny as misinformation, and then answer it only with their own proclamations, they become, in effect, judges in their own case.
The better path lies in the principles I proposed when defending government by consent and majority rule, subject to the law of nature. First, the burden of proof rests on power. FIFA, having acknowledged errors in handling immense commercial schemes, owes its members a full account: how decisions were framed, whose interests were consulted, what safeguards were neglected. Secondly, those who call for the president’s removal must submit their reasons, plainly and in writing, to the same universal judgment of the 211, not merely to their regional circles or to the court of public opinion. Thirdly, the procedures by which such a vote may be called ought themselves to be clear, regular, and known beforehand; otherwise the whole association lives by discretion, not law.
Until a pattern of arbitrary conduct is proved—such as the systematic bending of rules for private gain, or the silencing of critics by threat of sanction—the case is not yet one for revolt but for reform: sharper transparency, tighter constraints on executive discretion, and a more exact separation between personal and institutional interests. If, in time, a long train of abuses should indeed be shown, all tending to place the president and his circle above the common rule, then the same consent that raised him would be bound, in justice to the game and to those who love it, to cast him down. For the authority of any president, however global his stage, reaches no further than the continuing, reasoned trust of those who lent him their power in the first place.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — Government by consent and majority decision, with the legislative supreme but itself bound: a fiduciary power, held on trust, forfeited by breach.
- Second Treatise of Government — Escalates in stages: patient with single abuses and misjudgments, but watches for a long train of abuses all tending the same way, which reveals design — and design is what justifies resistance.