The Tamil Nadu Victory Party, or TVK, won both Assembly by-elections counted on 9 October 2026, taking Madurantakam and Dharapuram from the AIADMK. In Madurantakam, K. Maragatham Kumaravel polled 72,149 votes and beat the DMK’s I. Paranthamen, who got 52,068, by 20,081 votes. In Dharapuram, P. Sathyabama polled 66,841 votes and defeated the DMK’s S. Suganya, who got 57,370, by 9,471 votes. The AIADMK finished third in both seats, with 42,370 votes in Madurantakam and 45,280 in Dharapuram. Both seats fell vacant after AIADMK legislators resigned and joined the ruling party. Turnout was reported at 86.26 percent in Madurantakam and 80.30 percent in Dharapuram, and the counting took place on a single day, which gave the first clear reading of public opinion since the government took office in May. The results also left the DMK as the runner-up in both seats and sent a clear signal to the AIADMK.
The case that the result is a strong endorsement for the government is easy to make. TVK won with margins of four and five figures in the two seats, and the winner was more than 21,000 votes ahead of the AIADMK in Dharapuram and nearly 30,000 ahead in Madurantakam. The winners were sitting legislators who had resigned and re-contested under the new party’s symbol, and voters returned both of them. In Madurantakam, Maragatham Kumaravel added to the vote she had won in May and widened her margin. Reports put turnout at 86.26 percent in Madurantakam and 80.30 percent in Dharapuram, which suggests that voters were not turned off by a contest that had been forced by defections.
The counter-argument is that the picture is more mixed than the margins suggest. In Dharapuram, Sathyabama’s vote fell by 14,259 from May, and she won by under 10,000 votes against the DMK, so the contest there was much closer than in Madurantakam. The DMK finished second in both seats and polled 52,068 and 57,370 votes, which shows that the opposition vote did not collapse. Both by-elections were also caused by defections, and the AIADMK general secretary, Edappadi K. Palaniswami, has accused TVK of inducing opposition legislators to join it. The Left parties contested separately and campaigned against TVK, although their vote was small: the CPI(M) candidate got 1,679 votes in Madurantakam and the CPI candidate 1,157 in Dharapuram.
The results matter for the state because the by-elections were a test of whether voters would accept the movement of legislators between parties after an election. The answer from these two seats is that they did, at least when the legislators moved to the party in power. The result also changes the balance in the Assembly, since TVK now has 109 seats in a House of 234, although it is still nine short of the 118 needed for a majority on its own. Five other seats are vacant, and the party will want to win those as well when the by-elections for them are eventually held.
TVK passed its first electoral test since taking office, and it did so decisively in Madurantakam and narrowly in Dharapuram. Chief Minister Vijay had himself vacated the Tiruchirappalli East seat, which is one of the five vacancies still to be filled. The party now has to show that it can hold these seats without the defections that created them, and the remaining vacancies will test that.
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