Can box-office king Vijay turn his fan following into votes in Tamil Nadu?

Nearly two years on, veteran politicians and seasoned election observers are still wondering whether the box-office wunderkind’s entry into politics will trigger an upheaval in the state’s political landscape.

Intentionally or otherwise, Vijay is a political enigma. His entry into politics was not anticipated by the Dravidian establishment or the local media, but neither was it a big surprise. Not just actors, some of the state’s tallest leaders, such as C.N. Annadurai, founder of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), and his successor, M. Karunanidhi, had strong links to the film industry as writers. Both went on to become chief minister.

Despite his massive box-office popularity, Vijay is expected to, at best, create a third front, an alternative to the two Dravidian parties that have ruled over Tamil Nadu since 1967.

As with his movies, Vijay is keen to go it alone and may accept alliance partner(s) only if he can continue to be the star or first among equals, in any potential pre-election arrangement, say observers.

So, just who is this political greenhorn taking on some of the wiliest career politicians in Tamil Nadu, and maybe even the country?

The movie was directed by his father S.A. Chandrasekhar, a Christian hailing from a village at the southern tip of India, in Rameswaram municipality. The movie was produced by his Hindu mother Shoba.

Vijay chose his father’s religion as his own, a fact that will come to play a role in the political career he is now hoping to secure. Incidentally, the debut box office failure was slightly mitigated by Vijay bagging the Cinema Express Award for Best New Face.

Despite the initial disappointment, the father-son duo went on to create a formidable box-office brand over the next couple of decades. Vijay’s last five movies, released since 2019, have earned in excess of ₹1,500 crore at the box office on a total production budget of ₹1,000 crore, according to entertainment industry database imdb.com.

Further, according to Forbes India, in 2024, Vijay overtook Shah Rukh Khan and Rajinikanth to become the highest-paid film star in India—he reportedly charges anywhere between ₹130 crore and ₹275 crore for each film.

V. Narayanan, journalist and founding editor of Sun News, better known as Maalan, believes Vijay’s entry into politics may have a very practical angle. ‘Big-budget films featuring big stars like Kamal Haasan, Surya and even Rajinikanth don’t collect as expected. So, Vijay might have felt the market conditions are changing fast, and at 51, might have planned for an alternative career,” he said.

Sendhil Thyagarajan, managing partner of Sathya Jyothi Films, who is the grandson of R.M. Veerappan, the late AIADMK veteran and close associate of M.G. Ramachandran (MGR), believes Vijay may be trying to emulate MGR by trying to extend his celluloid popularity into votes, but lacks the political acumen or clear identity of the former chief minister.

Vijay’s fandom is global. Besides India, he has a following in the Tamil diaspora, comprising an estimated 70 million people living in 50 or so countries. His fan universe comprises over 2 million members spread across 85,000 fan clubs in Tamil Nadu. In terms of a following, he is second only to Rajnikanth, the biggest Tamil film star by a long stretch, who is reported to have 1,50,000 fan clubs, which translates to almost 4 million fans (25 per club).

While fan club and membership numbers in the film industry are not particularly reliable, even if one were to take these numbers at face value, they do not guarantee a political dividend. Movie fans may not necessarily vote for their matinee idols. ‘Super Star’ Rajnikath’s reluctance to form a political party, let alone contest in elections and a very talented Kamal Haasan’s failure to make a dent in the Tamil Nadu assembly election in 2021 or even the 2019 general election bear this out.

Despite this history, Vijay’s foundation for his political aspirations seems strongly tethered to his belief that his fan base can be turned into votes. “Vijay will be an important player (in the 2026 TN assembly election), a man to be watched. You cannot brush him aside,” said Ramesh, the chief reporter at Tuglak magazine, an influential and popular Tamil political weekly. Ramesh and many political observers like him expect the young electorate in Tamil Nadu, particularly first-time voters, to back Vijay, cutting across social and religious lines.

R.S. Bharathi, former member of the Rajya Sabha from the DMK, cautions against writing off Vijay casually. “Until elections, it is anybody’s guess. But it is also true that many film stars before him have failed to succeed in elections.”

The 78-year-old political veteran however, said that the leadership of the ruling DMK is countering Vijay’s attack with its own outreach to youth voters.

Young movie-going voters are a formidable constituency in Tamil Nadu, and the TVK party grew out of Vijay’s fan club ecosystem. However, seasoned political observers and strategists point out that a couple of million young fans cannot decide who gets to govern a large industrial powerhouse such as Tamil Nadu, which is also steeped in a complex caste-based electoral political system.

Several attempts to meet Vijay for this story through email and WhatsApp messages with senior TVK leaders yielded no results.

Among others, popular stars such as Sivaji Ganesan, Ramarajan, T. Rajendar, R. Sarathkumar and his wife, actor Radhika, had to settle for very limited success or complete failure in politics when they tried to ride on their popularity.

A closer look at the successes and failures provides some clues as to why very few win big. In an interview with The Federal magazine, S. Gurumurthy, political strategist and editor of Tuglak, warned that successes like MGR’s cannot be replicated by Vijay. He said that even before splitting the DMK to form his own party, AIADMK, in the early 1970s, MGR was already a party within the party. His successor, J. Jayalalithaa, an astute, strong-willed and suave politician, had cut her teeth in the AIADMK, first serving as the party’s propaganda secretary and later as general secretary, after MGR’s demise in 1987. She was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1984 before becoming the first woman chief minister of Tamil Nadu in 1991.

Before Vijay, actor Vijaykanth had projected himself as the ‘black’ MGR, but never came close to the original or ‘white’ MGR's political success. Long before he entered politics in 2005, Vijaykanth had endeared himself to the masses by donating food (like MGR) and had also served as president of the South Indian Film Artistes’ Association, a powerful industry lobby.

In contrast, Vijay had no real political experience or background until he formed the TVK in February 2024.

Vijay, too, seems to have acknowledged the organizational challenge before the TVK. To fix this, he recently welcomed K.A. Sengottaiyan, an AIADMK veteran and confidant of Jayalalithaa, into the TVK.

“Sengottaiyan knows every street in Tamil Nadu,” said Thuglak’s Ramesh. Jayalalithaa trusting him with election campaign planning offers some insight into his value within the AIADMK.

Sengottaiyan, who had been in the AIADMK since MGR’s days but left last October, is also expected to convince smaller parties to back Vijay’s TVK, thus creating a formidable third front.

However, having a political heavyweight like Sengottaiyan on his side may not deliver the success Vijay is hoping for. Many observers believe that even if the TVK manages to form an alliance with established parties such as the AIADMK or the Indian National Congress, and not just the smaller parties, it may at best help him become a disruptor in the 2026 assembly election. With less than five months to go, the chances of an alliance with Congress seem more plausible since Vijay’s political ambition to lead the next government does not align with AIADMK’s unwillingness to play second fiddle to even an electoral juggernaut like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), let alone an unproven TVK.

Furthermore, Vijay has already declared the BJP, which has aligned with the AIADMK to contest the 2026 assembly election, as his ideological opponent, and the ruling DMK as his political adversary. The difference may be important during the campaign cycle.

Furthermore, DMK’s Bharati believes that the fact that Vijay has focused on the state’s ruling party, while sparing the BJP at the Centre, may be indicative of a possible alliance between the TVK and the BJP.

An alliance between the TVK and AIADMK-BJP may still be possible. The cohort of first-time voters in Tamil Nadu, numbering almost 1.1 million out of the 63.6 million electorate, along with the 6% Christian population in the state, may be the reason the BJP is eyeing Vijay’s TVK as a potential alliance partner.

“Any alliance is possible at this stage. It is all about electoral politics,” said Rangaraj Pandey, a senior journalist with 26 years of experience, whose YouTube channel, Chanakyaa, has more than 2 million subscribers. The channel, in a recent survey, had predicted that TVK will bag anywhere between 10% and 20% of the vote share in the 2026 state election.

However, neither Pandey nor Chanakyaa have projected the number of assembly seats Vijay can win. This cannot be music to his ears.

In the 2024 general elections, the BJP, led by its hugely popular leader and former police officer K. Annamalai, managed to grab 11.24% vote share, up from 3.62% in 2019. And yet, it did not win any of the 19 seats it had contested. Neither did any of the BJP alliance partners. The DMK swept all 39 parliamentary constituencies.

Given all these challenges, the best outcome Vijay can expect is a hung assembly with his TVK-led alliance as the third wheel. If that happens, he could negotiate a good deal for himself and the TVK. To his advantage, Vijay is taking on the ruling DMK as his primary political opponent—the party has never won two consecutive state elections since its back-to-back victories in 1967 and 1971.

Vijay may still form alliances with smaller parties such as T.T.V. Dhinakaran's Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam, a breakaway from the AIADMK, as well as former chief minister O. Panneerselvam. Both these leaders grew under Jayalalithaa and possess long experience in street-level politics, something Vijay can use to his advantage.

Despite all the odds stacked against him, Vijay might still do better than most of his matinee idol predecessors. If Chanakyaa’s predictions come true, he may end up scripting a rare political success in Tamil Nadu. Vijay may outdo Vijayakanth by winning more votes, lead the opposition bench with far less experience than Jayalalithaa when she occupied that seat the first time, or become chief minister of Tamil Nadu quicker than his own hero, MGR. There is also a fourth possibility: a disastrous political debut, as with his film career.