NDA Continues to Enjoy People’s Confidence in AP
The TD-led NDA’s strong performance in urban local body elections is being cited by alliance leaders as evidence of voter support and effective coordination among partners.
The Telugu Desam-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) continues to enjoy the people’s confidence, as evident from the landslide victories its candidates registered in the urban local bodies (ULB) elections in Tuesday’s results.
Telugu Desam has an even stronger reason to rejoice beyond these victories as the results establish beyond doubt that the alliance with the Jana Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party is intact and the second rung leadership and cadre fully understands the necessity to wholeheartedly support each other and work for the alliance’s victory. “A well-oiled alliance is always a threat to us. The TD’s worst performance was the 39.17 vote percentage in 2019. In the event of the alliance continuing, the race always begins with 47 per cent of the votes for the NDA, with nearly six per cent of the Jana Sena and one per cent of the BJP against 40 per cent of YSR Congress,” admitted a senior YSR Congress leader. The YSRC, in its worst performance, recorded 39.38 of the vote in the 2024 polls.
Tuesday’s results also strengthens the narrative that the crucial section – neutral voters – is in no mood to vote for former chief minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy’s party again, after seeing his performance between 2019 and 2024.
Though TD leaders turned violent and prevented Opposition candidates from filing their nomination papers in a few pockets, giving scope for the YSR Congress to dub the results as a mockery of democracy, the NDA’s outstanding performance in the rest of the state where polls were held in a free and fair manner punctures the Opposition’s narrative.
“The best thing that happened for us was the smooth finalisation of seat-sharing and equally smooth transfer of vote among alliance partners,” said a senior Telugu Desam leader. The rebel menace was very limited, compared to previous instances when the TD went to polls in alliance with the BJP and the Left parties on different occasions in the erstwhile combined Andhra Pradesh, he pointed out.
Though at one stage Jana Sena president and Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan insisted on 40 municipalities and six corporations for his party, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu managed to convince the electoral partner to repeat the 2024 formula of taking seats where the party had fair chances of winning rather than sticking to numbers. The Jana Sena agreed to contest 21 municipalities and four corporations.
Pollsters also view the result as a severe setback for Jagan Mohan Reddy given that a strong narrative has been gaining traction that neutral voters, mainly the middle and upper middle classes, would not want to see him as CM again. “The swing vote in AP is about 10 per cent, taking the best and worst performances of the TD and the YSR Congress as a base. The swing mostly constitutes the upper middle class educated, employed and retired sections, which conveyed strong resentment against Jagan’s five year rule and expressed their unwillingness to vote for him again whenever feedback was taken in the last two years,” sources said.
For the TD, on the other hand, the results prove that the “Cheppam, Chestunnam” (we promised and we are delivering) slogan, coined by Telugu Desam general secretary and minister Nara Lokesh to explain the government’s commitment to fulfill its 2024 poll promises, works. In a social media post, Lokesh sought to underplay it, describing the verdict as a mandate to serve and not to celebrate, and people’s blessing for the good governance of the last two and a half years.
