Petra Sörling of Sweden, the reigning president of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), has been re-elected to the post for a second four-year term after a controversial election at the body’s annual general meeting (AGM) yesterday (May 27).
The AGM was conducted in Doha, Qatar, with Qatari representative Khalil Al-Mohannadi, the body’s executive vice president, her closest challenger.
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Sörling secured 104 votes to Al-Mohannadi’s 102, but upon the announcement of the results, Al-Mohannadi and others vocally protested, claiming that irregularities with the voting system had tainted the outcome.
A mixture of in-person and digital voting was used to count the votes, but Al-Mohannadi claimed that as many as five online ballots had been added after taking attendance.
The ITTF executive board subsequently suspended the AGM and held an emergency meeting before declaring Sörling the victor, claiming in a statement that the AGM “had to be suspended after it was disrupted by outsiders.”
Since the original meeting was suspended, the AGM will soon have to be reconvened, no later than November 2025, in order to elect Sörling’s vice presidents.
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By GlobalDataSörling has defended the vote, stating to Swedish news: “If anyone wants to appeal, they can go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport or a civil court.
“I can understand that you are disappointed when you lose by a difference of two votes and maybe want to try to find something. But for me it is completely unfounded. I do not see anything that contradicts our statutes and the legal expertise that was on site also says that.”
Sörling also stated her belief that the result was as close as it was due to the fact that the AGM was hosted in Qatar, adding: “You should never have an election on someone's home turf. It's not good in terms of 'good governance'.
“You have a lot of advantages when you're on your home turf and I'm pretty sure the result would have been clearer if we had been somewhere else.”
In the interview, conducted with the Dagens Nyheter publication, Sörling also called for a review of the ITTF’s rules regarding voting, lamenting that inactive nations hold the same amount of voting power as heavily active table tennis giants such as China.
Sörling was first elected as ITTF president in 2021, the body’s first female president, and in 2023 became the first ITTF president to gain International Olympic Committee membership.
