As BJP, AIADMK reunite, what it means for the Tamil Nadu Assembly polls next year

The BJP had just announced that it had managed to bring the AIADMK back to the NDA fold, almost two years since their alliance broke down, in time for the Assembly elections next year.

- 

The photo, however, underlined that AIADMK chief EPS, as Palaniswami is popularly known, had ensured that Annamalai, the outgoing Tamil Nadu BUP president, would not be around to queer the pitch for him. The discord between the two stemmed not from Annamalai’s criticism of the Dravidian party's icons Jayalalithaa and C N Annadurai, the first Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, but from the fact that both are from the same region (western Tamil Nadu) and the same caste (Gounders), This makes them rivals and claimants for the same political base.

Shah, the Union Home Minister, made it clear that EPS would lead the NDA in Tamil Nadu, signalling that the AIADMK chief would be the alliance’s chief ministerial candidate. In all likelihood, Annamalai will now move to national politics. Despite the cop-turned-politician’s hard work to build the BJP in the state, the party did not perform as well as expected, with its vote share jumping from 3.7% in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls to only 11.24% last year, The case for the two parties to come together is compelling. Their alliance got 40% of the vote share in the 2021 Assembly elections, with the DMK-Congress-Left alliance polling over 45% of the votes. When the AIADMK broke away from the NDA and contested last year's Lok Sabha elections on its own, it got 20.46% of the votes while the BUP-led group got 18%, together polling 41%. With the DMK-led alliance increasing its vote share to 47% in 2024, the difference between the two alliances has been around 5-6% in recent elections. If the NDA manages to make up some of this difference, the contest could become close.