CHENNAI: Chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami may have deftly handled the internal revolt by his deputy and AIADMK cooridnator O Panmeerselvam and got himself to be named as the CM candidate. With the mandate from his party, Palaniswami has launched a full-fledged campaign in the western districts and Cauvery delta region. But EPS has a tougher task on hand in maneuvering the tough posturing by his potential allies, especially the BJP and the PMK, who continue to defer accepting him as the CM candidate of the alliance. He has to tackle the aspirations of power sharing and demand for more seats from allies, including the DMDK, to set the house in order to take on the formidable looking DMK alliance.
Leader after leader in the BJP have been maintaining that the NDA will decide and name the chief ministerial candidate, though the party’s Tamil Nadu in-charge C T Ravi had conceded that the chief minister will be from the largest party in the alliance and that is the AIADMK. The saffron party, trying its best to break ground in Tamil Nadu and send elected representatives to the state assembly, has maintained its stand on power sharing. This, despite actor Rajinikanth’s decision not to launch his own party and enter electoral politics limiting its navigability on the alliance front.
The PMK too has been playing the hard ball. “We neither have an elected MP nor an MLA. If we can’t have even 25 MLAs, what is the purpose of having a party for more than 30 years?” PMK founder S Ramadoss lamented at the party’s general council on Thursday.
“It is a calculated move by the BJP not to acknowledge EPS as the CM candidate and maintain it as an NDA-led alliance, with firm hopes of sharing power if the alliance emerges victorious. Unlike a Jayalalithaa or Karunanidhi, who were automatic CM candidates of their respective alliances, parties such as the PMK may not like the unilateral decision of the AIADMK and are hence taking a tough stand,” said M Kasinathan, political analyst.
But AIADMK media coordinator and former Rajya Sabha MP A W Rabi Bernard terms the AIADMK’s decision to name its CM candidate and launch the campaign as a “marketing” and “branding” exercise. “It is the AIADMK, with its established vote bank, that will lead the alliance with all other parties in the alliance coming a distant second with their respective vote share. While the alliance partners have their own formalities to formally announce it, our chief minister is well equipped to handle such negotiations,” he said.