The alliance led by MK Stalin’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) emerged victorious in the recent Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly elections, defeating the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and its partners.
Interestingly, the two leading alliances grabbed all of the state’s 234 seats. Although no other party outside these two groups managed to win even a single seat, these smaller outfits seemingly played spoilsport for both, the DMK and the AIADMK, in several constituencies, an analysis by The Indian Express pointed out.
The DMK won 133 seats in the assembly polls. Along with its main ally, the Congress, it won in a total of 159 constituencies. The AIADMK won 66 segments and its key partners, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), secured four and five seats, respectively. Together, the two alliances bagged almost 85 percent of the vote share.
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Political parties such as actor-politician Kamal Haasan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) and TTV Dhinakaran’s Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK), which made their assembly polls debut this time, failed to bag a seat. Haasan and Dhinakaran themselves lost their respective contests.
However, with a vote share of 2.52 percent (MNM) and 2.35 percent (AMMK), these outfits tilted the results in several seats.
According to an analysis by the newspaper, the final poll result data shows that the AMMK impacted the winning chances of Dhinakaran’s former party, the AIADMK, in at least 20 seats by drawing votes from the traditional vote bank.
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In Mannargudi, the home turf of Dhinakaran’s aunt Sasikala, the DMK won with a margin of 37,393 votes. There, the AMMK bagged 40,481 votes even as the ruling AIADMK won 49,779 votes.
Thiruporur, Sankarankovil and Sattur were among the other seats where Dhinakaran’s party may have played a role in AIADMK loss.
However, the party founded in 2018, also negatively impacted the DMK’s vote share. For instance, in Neyveli constituency, where the DMK won by a margin of 977 votes, the AMMK polled 2,230 votes. In Katpadi, DMK won by a margin of 746 votes, but the AMMK bagged 1,066 votes.
According to the analysis carried out by the publication, the MNM seemed to pose a threat to the DMK, rather than the incumbent AIADMK.
Besides these, another party that may have affected the results in several seats is Tamil nationalist ideologue Seeman’s Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK). The party could not win a single seat but it improved its vote share to 6.58 percent, up from 1 percent in the previous assembly polls. The party had a four percent vote share in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. This hike in NTK’s vote share may have hampered the calculations of both DMK and AIADMK in multiple seats.
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