Tamil Nadu Assembly Elections 2026 | AIADMK steals a march over DMK in campaign, despite trailing on perception

The AIADMK, has marched ahead with its chief Edappadi K Palaniswami hitting the campaign trail ahead of others after settling alliance negotiations and announcing candidates for all but 19 constituencies the party is contesting.

Chennai: Till January, the ruling DMK-led Secular Progressive Alliance (SPA) appeared cohesive and battle-ready for the April 23 assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, while the AIADMK-headed National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lagged far behind in perception as well as in stitching a coalition.

Three months down the line, things have flipped. The AIADMK, which has not won an election since the death of its charismatic leader J Jayalalithaa in 2016, has marched ahead with its chief Edappadi K Palaniswami hitting the campaign trail ahead of others after settling alliance negotiations and announcing candidates for all but 19 constituencies the party is contesting.

On the other side, the DMK, which took about a month to conclude seat-sharing talks with alliance parties, burnt the midnight oil to identify seats for the party and constituents of the SPA. Due to persisting differences between the allies, the DMK struggled to identify the seats for each of the constituent and completed the exercise only Saturday evening.

While the DMK announced its candidates, others are yet to start the process and are racing against time as nominations can be filed only on four days due to public holidays and weekend between March 30 and April 6, the last date for filing the papers.

AIADMK, which cobbled up a rainbow coalition in about a month, decided the number of seats for alliance partners during meetings between Palaniswami and Union Home Minister Amit Shah in New Delhi and identified the constituencies here. The alliance came under heavy criticism for taking decisions in Delhi, but the signing of the agreements at the AIADMK headquarters here drowned out those voices.

While there is no public criticism, there are strong murmurs that the AIADMK “gifted away” much of the losing seats to its alliance partners, including the BJP, and reinforced its authority within the NDA.

Seats preferred by former state chief K Annamalai and a few young leaders were not allotted by the AIADMK, which gave away 15 seats currently held by DMK ministers, many of them are veterans and heavyweights, to its alliance partners, inviting criticism whether it was scared of taking them on. However, on paper, everything remains smooth in the NDA.

Trouble in the DMK-led SPA, stitched in 2019 and remains intact, began in February when Congress gave mixed signals about its alliance with the ruling party and praising newbie politician Vijay and his TVK. The induction of late actor Vijayakanth’s DMDK into the alliance to further strengthen it added to the confusion as the number of assembly seats committed to them remained a secret until it was officially announced earlier this week.

While the DMK forced its long-standing allies such as the IUML, CPI (M), CPI, and MDMK to accept lesser seats than they were allotted in 2021, the party allotted 10 seats and a Rajya Sabha berth to the DMDK, causing a consternation among allies. Only Congress and VCK got additional seats from their 2021 tally, that too after protracted negotiations and a public spat.

Allies like the IUML publicly criticized the DMK’s decision to allot 10 seats to the DMDK – apparently everyone was told that they might get seats in single digit – but the justified the move saying the Vijayakanth-led party has presence, though limited, across the state. DMDK was inducted to further strengthen the alliance to ensure that the SPA scores a major victory in the intense four-cornered contest.

This was for the first time that the allies of DMK publicly criticized the party on seat-sharing.

“We didn’t expect that the alliance talks and identification of constituencies will take this long. We had hoped to complete them by the third week of March but differences that allies had over our offers delayed the process. We lost about a week or so, but we are hopeful we will catch up once the Chief Minister hits the campaign trail,” a senior DMK leader told DH.