Tamil film star’s shock poll win is playbook for slaying giants in Gen Z era

In the lead-up to Tamil Nadu film superstar Vijay’s stunning election victory in his state this week on his maiden try, various voices from the decades-old incumbent party he sought to unseat blasted him for hubris.

The refrain was this: You may be the state’s biggest, most bankable action hero, but what makes you think that will help you become chief minister in just one try?

“Yes, you will win, and the rest of us who have been running political parties for 80 years will go off and eat our popsicles,” one popular surrogate of the now-defeated Chief Minister M.K. Stalin bellowed sarcastically in stump speech after stump speech shared widely on social media.

But win Mr Vijay did – in seismic fashion, with his party upending expectations of a washout by winning the most seats, besting the so-called Dravidian duopoly that has governed Tamil Nadu for decades: Mr Stalin’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).

While much of the global attention on India’s state election results this week has focused on West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) scored a landslide win to prove his dominance is back after the setback of 2024, Tamil Nadu may matter just as much. As one of India’s most industrialised states, with annual growth of around 10 per cent outpacing the national average, Tamil Nadu’s political landscape carries regional and even global implications. This is especially so as the state becomes a critical factory floor for global firms hedging against China.

At the time of writing, Mr Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) has yet to officially form a government, having landed just shy of a simple majority with 108 seats. But the sheer scale of this upheaval against the DMK – fuelled by Gen Z citizens in a state where one in five eligible voters is under 30 – warrants close attention from outsiders.

For disruptors across Asia and beyond hoping to upend entrenched establishments, the methods used here could well serve as an updated, Version 2026 manual for political giant-slaying.

One big idea

For outsider political outfits, prising open the door to power always involves unorthodox tactics and taking risks that defy conventional wisdom about how parties should behave. In that vein, one of the key things Mr Vijay and his TVK did was eschew the idea that competitive politics requires a rigid ideology or a well-populated policy platform.

Indeed, throughout the campaign, Mr Vijay and his lieutenants were blasted by analysts for this very reason, with many talking heads on TV dismissing their rhetoric as mere cinematic sloganeering.

But the reality is that the actor seemed to grasp something crucial: His target youth demographic did not actually mind that he spoke little about granular industrial policy or job growth metrics.

Of course, as is par for the course in Indian and Tamil politics, TVK had its requisite handout promises – among them a 2,500 rupee (S$33.50) monthly assistance for women heads of households, and a 4,000 rupee unemployment allowance for graduates.

Still, the overarching campaign was not built on any bloated policy manifesto. Instead, it relied on what was essentially One Big Idea.

That idea was digestible everywhere, from urban Chennai to the rural hinterland: Mr Stalin’s DMK and the AIADMK were two sides of the same corrupt, dynastic coin, both quietly in cahoots with Mr Modi’s BJP. Against them, TVK offered maatram – change – defined by incorruptibility and clean governance.

It was a message reminiscent of former United States president Barack Obama’s “Change” and “Yes We Can” slogans. In retrospect, this singular focus was enough to convert anti-incumbency into overwhelming support at the ballot box. Rather than relying on scattershot messaging, TVK sticking to its guns on what pundits lampooned as an abstract pitch paid off handsomely.

Insta-first strategy

Another discernible trend in TVK’s campaign was its deliberate decision to keep a wide berth from legacy media. Mr Vijay did not give a single sit-down video interview, or offer even doorstop-style comments to the press, in all the months of formal campaigning.

In person, he relied mainly on large rallies where his fiery speeches ran 30 minutes, tops. Even those physical gatherings were stymied after the much-reported stampede at an event in September 2025 forced a dial-back on massive crowds.

While competitors had their own aligned TV channels, TVK relied instead on what can only be described as an “Instagram-first” media strategy.

All of Mr Vijay’s speeches, including the one he made just three days before the polls, seemed engineered specifically for short videos. They were segmented with multiple crescendos and cinema-esque punchlines, complete with cutaways to rallygoers going wild as he unleashed his lines and gestures – including one where he mimed plucking his heart out and throwing it to the crowd.

Much of this content was then saturated across the internet by his party’s so-called cyberwarriors, whom he explicitly thanked on social media in the aftermath of the polls for being pivotal to the victory.

There is nothing entirely new here, of course. It keeps with a growing global trend in which politicians are exploring new platforms to reach out to younger voters. But if the influence of the “podosphere” was the big revelation of recent elections, including in Singapore, Tamil Nadu took it one step further: bypassing even long-form podcasts in favour of the viral velocity of short video reels.

Long game, short game

It would be remiss to discuss the factors behind Mr Vijay’s political earthquake without pointing out the obvious: A big part of his machine, and arguably his success, has to do with brand recognition as one of the best-known Tamil actors of his generation. As the 51-year-old – who goes by his stage name, though his full name is C. Joseph Vijay – himself argued in his final campaign speech, voters had known him intimately, beamed into their households, for three decades before his political entry.

Admittedly, this is hardly a novelty in Tamil Nadu. The southern Indian state’s longest-serving chief minister was M.G. Ramachandran, better known as MGR. Arguably the biggest Tamil film star of modern times, he led the state from 1977 until his death in 1987 as head of the AIADMK after splintering from the DMK.

Mr Stalin’s own father, the late M. Karunanidhi, was a celebrated screenwriter, and Mr Stalin himself acted briefly. Their long-time nemesis was J. Jayalalithaa, MGR's protege, co-star and – some say – romantic partner. She led the AIADMK and served six terms as chief minister before her death in 2016. The cinema-politics nexus here runs deep.

Still, what Tamil Nadu analysts have flagged as the more instructive lesson is the skilful, patient build-up of Mr Vijay’s political career. If delivering his trademark on-screen punchlines was about timing, then so was entering politics: a long game of brand-building, followed by a deliberately short game in competitive politics.

In an August 2025 Substack post, Indian journalist Prem Panicker detailed this gradual ascent. Beginning in 2009, Mr Vijay structured his vast fan association into a grassroots movement. Then, through the 2010s, he began choosing film roles that cast him as a defender of the oppressed – much like MGR before his own political foray.

He formed TVK only in 2024, and formally launched his bid to contest the 2026 state polls only in 2025. This trajectory shows a keen understanding that star power on its own is not a silver bullet for political success. It is a superpower, without question, but it still needs to be husbanded carefully and not squandered. Launching too early risks voter fatigue; dawdling risks irrelevance. By entering the game late and finishing strong, Mr Vijay proved that timing is everything.

Establishment outsiders with existing mass followings who harbour political ambitions – whether civil activists, sportspeople, or even comedians (US late-night host Stephen Colbert recently joked he was mulling over a 2028 presidential run) – would do well to take notes.

The cost of unorthodoxy

Yet, acknowledging the effectiveness of these tactics is one thing but emphatically endorsing them as meritorious for democracy is quite another.

It may well be that these methods work perfectly to capture the youth vote, and political outsiders must naturally play the cards they are dealt. But there is a cost.

For instance, politicians eschewing legacy media – at the risk of this columnist pleading the case for his own profession – means bypassing the vital, independent interrogation of policies. Relying purely on direct, unfiltered communication to the masses will inevitably hurt democratic accountability.

The same goes for running a manifesto-lite campaign.

No right-thinking political observer with the public interest in mind would advise future candidates to simply not bother with detailed manifestos, or to avoid costing their spending plans, in favour of campaigning purely on “vibes”.

Political operatives advising parties may rub their hands in glee if this becomes the new normal, but it is simply not healthy in the long term.

There is no doubt these unorthodox methods contributed to what Mr Vijay rightfully celebrated as a victory of democracy over “moneytocracy”. But having bypassed the traditional system to unexpectedly win the election, the ultimate test now is whether his Insta-first movement can transition from slaying giants to actually governing well.