MNM draws a blank in urban civic polls

A day after celebrating the fifth year of the party’s formation, actor Kamal Haasan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam suffered yet another setback with a failure to win even a single seat in the urban local body polls and the fourth election in a row.

Despite the losses suffered in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and last year’s Assembly polls and the decline in the vote share from 3.69 per cent to 2.62 per cent, the MNM continued to get good chunk of votes from urban areas particularly, Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai. In Chennai, MNM finished third in 12 out of the 16 Assembly constituencies. A senior MNM leader said that they hoped to win a few wards in the corporations, municipalities and town panchayats.

“We fielded a limited number of candidates in the urban local body polls in places where we thought we stand a chance to win. But it did not happen,” the leader said.

MNM state secretary Siva Elango said that his party office-bearers would soon meet to analyse the reason for the debacle.“We are a four-year-old party. Our target is 2024 Lok Sabha polls where we target to get double-digit vote share,” he said. Three candidates were threatened and made to join DMK in Madurai and Dindigul, he added.