Vijay C Joseph earned this. A debut election, 35 per cent of the vote, 106 seats, and a sitting chief minister defeated in his own backyard. But to stop the story there would be to miss the larger truth — that the DMK and the AIADMK spent five years doing campaign work for Vijay and his partyTVK. The mistakes the two parties made over the years were so consistent they read like a plan to build a case for Vijay.

Tamil Nadu's numbers on May 4 are not subtle. TVK, a party that did not exist five years ago, won 106 seats on 35.1 per cent of the vote in its first election ever, according to the Election Commission of India. The DMK, which had governed Tamil Nadu for five years under MK Stalin, fell from 37.7 per cent in 2021 to 24.2 per cent, winning 59 seats. The AIADMK, which fought this election as the principal opposition, dropped from 33.3 per cent to 21.1 per cent, taking 47 seats. Together, the two parties that have between them runTamil Nadufor nearly six decades gave up 26 combined percentage points in a single electoral cycle.

MK Stalin won the 2021 election on 159 seats and a wave of goodwill. May 4, 2026, brought him a shock – the incumbent chief minister lost his own constituency to TVK candidate VS Babu, a seat he had won in 2021 with 1,05,522 votes.

That personal defeat is not incidental. It is a summary of five years of alleged misgovernance and the allegations against his ministers. In a single day in April 2025, the Supreme Court slammed Tamil Nadu Minister V Senthil Balaji for resuming his ministerial duties after getting bail in a money laundering case; the Madras High Court reversed a 2007 discharge of senior DMK minister Durai Murugan in a disproportionate assets case, and the same court registered a suo motu case against Forest Minister Ponmudy for alleged hate speech. Three ministers. Eight hours. One day.

Then came TASMAC (Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation Limited). The Enforcement Directorate alleged that a network involving politicians, bureaucrats, and distillery owners siphoned off more than Rs 1,000 crore through manipulated tenders, inflated expenses, and illegal transactions through Tamil Nadu's state-run liquor corporation. The Madras High Court greenlighted the ED's investigation. Multiple ministers and political appointees were under the scanner, according to Enforcement Directorate statements reported by PTI.

The drug problem compounded it. A Madras University criminology department survey, cited by the Madras High Court in 2024, found that 15 per cent of drug transactions in Chennai were being facilitated through mobile apps. The joint Narcotics Control Bureau and Delhi Police Special Cell operation that led to DMK functionary and film producer Jaffer Sadiq's arrest — he was subsequently expelled from the DMK's NRI wing — revealed an international drug trafficking network spanning India, New Zealand, Australia, and Malaysia, according to official agency statements. The DMK expelled him and moved on. Voters did not.

None of this is to suggest every allegation was proven. But these issues did resonate in the minds of the voters of Tamil Nadu.

Tamil Nadu has voted out the incumbent in every election since 1984 with one exception, per documented electoral history. The DMK gave voters more reasons than usual to follow that tradition.

If the DMK's failure was governance, the AIADMK's failure was strategy, and it was arguably the more avoidable of the two.

In September 2023, AIADMK, largely divided after the death of J. Jayalalithaa, officially severed its ties with the BJP-led NDA, per recorded party announcements. It chose to fight 2026 alone with no national alliance, no significant coalition partners. In a three-cornered contest where the anti-DMK vote was going to be split between itself and a new, massively popular party TVK, fighting alone was not a position of strength. It was a political miscalculation.

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