The 2026 Tamil Nadu assembly election explained

Tamil Nadu voted for its seventeenth legislative assembly on 23 April, with Chief Minister MK Stalin seeking a second consecutive term in office, a feat no leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam has ever achieved. The election is largely seen as a referendum on his five years in power, while the entrance of actor Joseph C Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam will judge the lasting power of the two Dravidian parties. It is unclear if the TVK will take away enough anti-DMK votes from the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam—which enters this election in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party—to help Stalin break a record that neither his father, M Karunanidhi, nor the party’s founder, CN Annadurai, could.

The four states in this election cycle all lie on the frontier of the BJP’s nationwide expansion, since 2014, into states where it had never previously been competitive, and previous iterations have often served as a reality check for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In Assam, the BJP has entrenched itself firmly in power and is now seeking to perpetuate its rule through gerrymandering and mass deportations. In West Bengal, it has marginalised the Indian National Congress and the Left Front to establish itself as the primary opposition but has failed to cut into the ruling All India Trinamool Congress’s formidable vote share. In Kerala, it is now a legitimate third front, affecting close contests across the state and hoping to win more than the single seat it won in 2016 and 2024. In Tamil Nadu, the BJP assembled an alliance that won two Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 general election. However, twelve years later, it is still roughly where it was, trying to piggyback off regional powers while facing an internal clamour to go it alone.

The reason for the BJP’s failure to establish itself, despite its considerable efforts, is that the Dravidian movement has been firmly in control of the political mainstream for almost six decades. In every assembly election since 1971, parties born out of the movement have collectively won around seventy percent of the seats. They tend to rise and fall at each other’s expense, often based on the electorate’s opinion of which of them has better adhered to Dravidian principles, such as federalism, representation and social welfare, rather than reflecting some sort of referendum on the ideology itself. Both the DMK and the AIADMK maintain committed cadre and loyal supporters across the state, and their symbols are so ubiquitous that their allies often use them for their own candidates. Unlike the communists in West Bengal and Kerala, who compromised with their principles to govern in the neoliberal era, the Dravidian parties, which have always drawn support from all economic strata, have long been comfortable building a large industrial base. They have also proven adept at the neoliberal paradigm of treating voters primarily as consumers of goods and services including good governance, leading to an era of competitive welfarism in the state.

Not only does this leave the BJP little room to grow on its own, the party is widely perceived as antithetical to the movement’s ideals and has quite successfully been cast as the primary antagonist for Dravidian politics. Its failures in recent elections have not been due to lack of trying. Much like the Congress in its period of national dominance, the BJP under Modi has leveraged the powers of the union government to make itself relevant in state politics. It first tried to rule by proxy through a crumbling AIADMK. Then, once Stalin came to power, in 2021, its handpicked governor, RN Ravi, took an obstructionist line, refusing to sign legislation until the Supreme Court compelled him. He would often skip parts of the governor’s addresses that the state government wrote for him and unilaterally attempted to dismiss sitting ministers. The Modi government also stopped central funds for school education because the Stalin government would not adhere to the New Education Policy.