Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
president election 2017

In the last phase, Presidential Election seems to have gotten into an interesting phase, with the opposition set to give a tough fight to BJP’s candidate. Bhartiya Janata Party and its allies, known as NDA, have a vote share of 48.64%, slightly less than the majority. In such a case, if all opposition parties come together, fight for the post of president can become way to interesting and competitive.

Six regional parties including AIADMK (Tamil Nadu), TRS (Telangana), AAP (Delhi and Punjab), BJD (Odisha), YSRCP (Andhra Pradesh) and INLD (Haryana) hold around 13% of total vote share and none of them is inclined towards any of BJP or Congress. Congress and its supporting parties have a vote share of 35.47% and if these 6 regional parties too come in the support, the total vote share will become 48.53%, slightly less than that of NDA.

If there is such a case, BJP might have tough time making its candidate win. However, looking at BJP’s recent success and its growing stature in the national politics, it does not seem very unlikely that the party will not be able to gather support of one or two regional parties. For that, the coalition will also have to make sure that the parties within NDA, do not play foul at the last moment. Provided, Shiv Sena has been pretty vocal against BJP and its policies in the last few months.

There are numerous other very small parties across the country, which account for less than 3% vote share combined. They do not openly support any of the coalition or are not even so powerful to compete with the big parties in their home states. Generally, these parties swing with the air and support the winning combination. However, their swing to either side might make things way more interesting.

In the recently concluded budget session, BJP had called a meeting of its allies to send a signal of unity among with NDA members at the same time, Sonia Gandhi has been pretty active meeting the leaders of other parties to float the biggest ever coalition in order to stop BJP from making its candidate win the Presidential Election. TMC chief and Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had also met BJD chief Naveen Patnaik recently.

Vote Calculation for Presidential Elections

The voting for president is done by the elected leaders of both the houses from state and central government. In total, there are 784 MPs and 4114 MLAs in centre and 31 legislative assemblies.

Every vote by an MP is taken as 708 votes and the vote value of MLAs differ according to the size of respective state assembly. An MLA in UP has a vote value of 208 and at the same time, an MLA from Sikkim is accounted for 7 votes.

The pictures below will give slightly better idea about the distribution of votes across parties.

NDA vote share president election

UPA vote share president electionfloating parties vote share president election

Picture Credits & Source : Economic Times

By Prithviraj Singh Chauhan

Part time journalist, full-time observer. Editor-in-Chief at The Indian Wire. I cover updates related to business and startups.

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