On March 23, Edappadi K. Palaniswami walked into his party headquarters in Chennai for a show of strength. His NDA partners, including Pattali Makkal Katchi leader Anbumani Ramadoss, state BJP president Nainar Nagendran and Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam leader T.T.V. Dhinakaran, were by his side for a joint press conference, where they announced the seat allocation for the assembly elections.
But it was only a “show” of strength. The projection was that Palaniswami, head of the AIADMK, had been generous—he had given 27 seats to the BJP, 18 to the PMK and 11 to the AMMK—and was confident of taking on Chief Minister and DMK president M.K. Stalin. However, those who watched him closely saw that Palaniswami was fighting his friends within the alliance and trying to stamp his authority. Within the AIADMK, he wants to convey the message that he is the only leader of the party.
The AIADMK has always been unipolar. It revolved around M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) in its early days and then J. Jayalalithaa after his death in 1987. She led the party to victory in the 2001, 2011 and 2016 state elections. However, since her death in 2016, no one leader has been able to carry that torch.
The party has been steadily losing vote share, which is attributed mostly to factional feuds and defections. “I call him pathu tholvi (10-time loser) Palaniswami. The AIADMK has lost every election under his leadership,” former chief minister O. Panneerselvam, who recently moved to the DMK, told THE WEEK. He himself was once the face of the AIADMK after Jayalalithaa.
The dravidian party, which won 52 of 78 assembly seats in north Tamil Nadu in the 2011 assembly elections, won only 35 in 2016 and just 10 in 2021. In central Tamil Nadu, better known as the delta region, of 41 seats, the AIADMK won 26 in 2011, 25 in 2016 and four in 2021. In the western belt, its bastion, of 57 seats, it won 39 in 2011, 42 in 2016 and 35 in 2021. In south Tamil Nadu, of 58 seats, it won 33 in 2011, 32 in 2016 in only 17 in 2021.
This time, the party’s prospects in the south and north are suffering because Jayalalithaa’s aide V.K. Sasikala, who floated her own party, is campaigning against Palaniswami. As is Panneerselvam. The DMK leadership has told him to campaign against the AIADMK leadership among the Thevar community, from Theni near Madurai to Tenkasi down south. The Thevars, who are the majority voters in the south, were once loyal AIADMK voters.
Interestingly, even before Panneerselvam quit the AIADMK, K.A. Sengottaiyan, a Jayalalithaa loyalist who wanted to bring together all splinter groups, was expelled and soon joined actor Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK). On his way out, he took several AIADMK office-bearers from the south and the north. On March 29, when Vijay released the TVK’s candidate list, at least 19 were from the AIADMK.
With the TVK’s emergence, the AIADMK’s claim to being the only anti-DMK dravidian party is gone. But even before Vijay launched his party in 2024, the BJP-led NDA, headed by former IPS officer K. Annamalai, ensured that the anti-DMK vote did not benefit the AIADMK in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. He campaigned against the DMK and Palaniswami, helping the NDA get 18 per cent vote share against the AIADMK’s reduced 20.46 per cent. The AIADMK and the BJP were allies from 2019-23, took a break, and have been together since 2025. It is important to note here that the BJP had enabled the splitting of the AIADMK to begin with.
Women voters had supported the AIADMK because of MGR’s screen presence and Jayalalithaa’s charisma. With the latter gone, there was a dip of at least 10 per cent in women voters for the party, thanks in part to Stalin’s welfare plank.
Vijay’s entry took away the young voters, too.
With all this, the AIADMK finds itself in a tough spot. In the modern political context, its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. In an era where next-generation voters often want bold narratives, or to feel like they are part of a revolution, the AIADMK—built on governance, welfare delivery and political pragmatism—finds it difficult to reposition itself.
In earlier elections, the AIADMK had set itself up as a bulwark against both the DMK and the BJP by stressing misgovernance and corruption. In 2024, this framing was muted. Instead, the party seemed caught between a nostalgia for the MGR–Jayalalithaa era and an uncertain realignment with a Hindu nationalist idiom that sat uneasily with the dravidian core of Tamil politics.
The 2024 mistake of contesting alone fuelled speculation that the AIADMK’s decline was no longer transitional, but structural. “The party’s vote share, now around 20 per cent, is not insignificant, but it lacks coherence,” said Vignesh Karthik K.R., a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. “This electoral thinning coincides with an ideological drift. The post-2024 public speeches by EPS in the lead-up to the 2026 assembly elections reveal a new willingness to echo hindutva themes, including questioning the state’s decision to allocate temple funds for educational institutions. This line of attack neither resonates with the party’s core base nor offers a clear break from the BJP’s rhetorical framework.”
At the centre of this is Palaniswami. “In the 10 years after the demise of Amma, I have struggled hard to keep the party together,” he said. “Several B teams tried breaking the party, but I have ensured that MGR’s and Amma’s followers stay together.”
True, Palaniswami has been fighting detractors within and outside the party, but it has cost the AIADMK heavily. While comparisons have been drawn with other regional parties facing decline, the AIADMK retains a more substantial support base. However, without ideological clarity, in a state deeply rooted in dravidian ideology, its ability to convert this base into a meaningful electoral outcome remains doubtful.