The ambitious TVK, which will contest the 2026 Assembly elections on its own, must do a lot to unseat the Chief Minister MK Stalin-led DMK alliance.
Published Aug 25, 2025 | 9:00 AM ⚊ Updated Aug 25, 2025 | 12:20 PM
Actor Vijay addressing TVK cadres.
Synopsis: Actor-politician Vijay has done enough to raise a host of valid questions in Tamil Nadu, where movie stars entering politics is a common enough feature. The 51-year-old leader of the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam is expected to play a significant role in state politics in the emerging reality, but it won’t be easy.
Do big crowds at political rallies mean votes? Can movie-screen popularity help one rise in politics? Is general popularity enough to run a political organisation? Can fan clubs become party cadres? Can vote share mean seat share? Is winning elections enough when you want to run the government?
A huge rally addressed by Tamil film star Vijay — popularly addressed as Thalapathy (leader) — in Madurai last week was an arrival statement that showed his serious intent to make an impact in state politics. The orderly crowd, variously estimated at between 1.5 and four lakhs, was enough to make tongues wag, eyebrows go up, and ears perk up.
One thing that can be said with certainty is that Vijay has done enough to raise a host of valid questions in Tamil Nadu, where movie stars entering politics is a common enough feature, but winners are not as easy to call by a superficial observer.
Many questions hang in the air across the southern state as it gears up for assembly elections next year — and it becomes important to separate image from reality and hype from probability. We need to measure dynamic change in politics and society to get a reasonable estimate of the importance of Joseph Vijay.
I do believe the 51-year-old leader of the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) will play a significant role in state politics in the emerging reality, but it won’t be easy.
The ambitious TVK, which will contest the 2026 Assembly elections on its own, must do a lot to unseat the Chief Minister MK Stalin-led DMK alliance from the sweeping power it acquired in the 2021 Assembly elections and backed it up with thumping success in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Stalin is a trained political gladiator. Apart from the might of his cadre-based Dravidian movement party that counts caste-centric social justice and high economic growth as vote-catching issues, the dynamism of the chief minister is more than apparent in the slew of welfare programmes targeting various social groups and women, not to speak of his frequent attempts to reinforce Tamil pride.
Tamil Nadu has a resource-rich government, and spending on welfare programmes is bound to go a long way.
Vijay is targeting alleged corruption under DMK rule and the fact that Stalin is anointing his son and Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi as a dynastic successor, but adds that his ideology is no different from that of the DMK. Here’s where we need to look beyond ideology and include other factors to see where Vijay might lead himself – and politics in his state.
I see a good chance of Vijay’s TVK getting an eight to 10 percent vote share in the Assembly elections. However, that won’t be enough to make him the next chief minister, as he claims, nor does that number yield an equivalent seat share in a parliamentary system with 234 seats, such as Tamil Nadu. But that is sufficient to keep him firmly in the game.
His best-case scenario might emerge if the main Opposition AIADMK, led by Edappadi K. Palaniswami (EPS), becomes his coalition ally in a realignment of the state’s political equations. AIADMK currently has an uneasy alliance with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP.
The word kazhagam, the authentic Tamil word for “party,” is symbolic of the Dravidian movement that is pitted against the Hindi-loving and Hindu-centric BJP, and is its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
DMK, AIADMK and TVK are all kazhagams that see the BJP as a steamroller whose long-term strategy is to impose a north-and-upper-caste-Hindu worldview on southern India.
However, everybody wants to be in power and use it well to keep it — and that explains all sorts of alliances and coalitions.
The ghosts of MG Ramachandran (MGR) and his AIADMK successor Jayalalithaa hang over Tamil Nadu’s political scene, and the enormous vacuum left by their deaths is what Vijay is trying to fill. Between them, these two movie stars ruled Tamil Nadu for 24 of the 39 years until Jayalalitha’s demise in 2016.
They bitterly opposed the DMK from which MGR had broken away to form the AIADMK.
Here’s where Vijay faces a huge challenge. MGR built his party by snatching DMK’s cadres and also had decades of experience as a grassroots political campaigner — something that Vijay is trying to match by hiring Prashant Kishor from Bihar as his “special advisor”. He hopes Kishor might do for him through an “outsourcing model” what he has done in the past for the BJP, DMK, TMC, and AAP.
However, there is a limit to which external consultants can help an organisation, be it in politics or business.
MGR also built up his popularity by playing on the screen working man or toiler roles (such as rickshaw puller, fisherman, boatman). He projected himself as an “ezhai pangali” (partner of the poor). Vijay, likening himself to a hunting lion, is not quite there, but his recent cinematic forays do express his political agenda.
In Bairavaa (2017), Vijay takes on a commercialised education mafia as a do-gooder fighting for justice. In Sarkar (2018), a non-resident Indian corporate honcho returns to vote in his state, only to discover that somebody has fraudulently exercised the franchise in his name. In Master (2021), Vijay fights organised crime.
In the poster of his upcoming movie, Jana Nayagan (People’s Hero), Vijay is brandishing an authoritarian whip in a visual symbolic of a popular role played by MGR. You get the picture.
The partial cine-image appeal, his youthful posturing, and well-rehearsed oratorial skills packed with punchlines might impress a good chunk of Tamil Nadu’s young electorally floating population. According to the 2011 census, Tamil Nadu’s urban population was more than 48 percent, the highest in India, towering above the national average of 31 percent.
Also, according to official data from 2021, those between 10 and 59 years make up 75 percent of Tamil Nadu’s population. Even if half of that segment is considered as the youthful voter category, we are looking at an addressable “young” political market of 37 percent of the population. As someone who projects an energetic, youthful appeal, that is a big positive for Vijay.
However, caste affiliations, knowledgeable local cadres, and distinctly deliverable promises are where Vijay is facing yawning gaps. Here is where even the mighty BJP has to stand on the shoulders of its ally AIADMK. The interesting thing is that Vijay at his muscle-flexing rally pre-empted critics by citing the holes that others pick in his political march and pointed to his past few months to show progress — thus suggesting that he can only get better.
The AIADMK-led alliance, which included the BJP, polled more than 39 percent of the votes as it lost power in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections in 2021 to the DMK-led alliance, which secured 45 percent of the votes. The DMK on its own got more than 37 percent of the votes, while the AIADMK got 33 percent.
For Vijay to make an impact, his youth-plus-urban appeal must wean away about a third of the votes from the remaining 30 percent of voters, which is not impossible, and also hope to get a slice of the votes in an anti-incumbency mood that is not really in sight.
TVK may also get slivers of votes from the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) — which is now haemorrhaging in a father-son duel — and the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) — whose founder and movie star Vijayakanth died in 2023.
Also, if the cadres of the AIADMK — already split into three factions after Jayalalithaa’s demise — feel Vijay is a better horse to back or at least a stepping stone to future defections, there might be an increased momentum in his favour.
All we can say at this juncture is that it is too early to write off Vijay — and too optimistic to see him as the next MGR. What is more likely in politically savvy Tamil Nadu is that he commands a vote share that might give him some strong bargaining chips in coalitions.
(Views are personal. Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
