TVK Sweeps 44 Seats in Northern Tamil Nadu, Marking Dramatic Shift from DMK Dominance

CHENNAI: Northern Tamil Nadu, which had been the bastion of the DMK ever since the party first contested the Assembly election in 1957, has delivered a most dramatic verdict with Vijay’s TVK sweeping 44 of the 71 seats in the 11 districts in the Northern Tamil Nadu. Of the 78 seats across 11 districts in the Northern district in Tamil Nadu, while TVK swept in 44 seats including 14 seats in Chennai, AIADMK led alliance won in as many as 19 seats, while the DMK-led SPA, which won 64 seats in the 2021 Assembly election, won just eight. While the collapse of the DMK’s dominance in the Northern districts is stark, the SPA’s loss of 56 seats was entirely harvested by the new entrant Vijay’s TVK, which did not even exist five years ago during the 2021 Assembly election. Nowhere is the shift more dramatic than in Chennai . Even when the former Chief Minister MG Ramachandran contested his first election in 1977 and reduced DMK to 48 seats, DMK held the Chennai seats firmly, winning 13 of the 14 seats in the city. Now the TVK has won 14 of the city’s 16 Assembly segments, leaving the DMK with only Harbour and Chepauk-Thiruvallikeni, both by wafer-thin margins. DMK president MK Stalin himself has lost the seat to the debutant TVK’s VS Babu.