A customised campaign bus arrived at the SP office in Lucknow on Wednesday for the proposed ‘PDA Rath Yatra’ themed around the party’s formula of consolidating backward, Dalit, and Muslim, or pichhda, Dalit and alpsankhyak voters. Opposition Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav is expected to begin a statewide campaign in the last week of October ahead of the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.
SP Achieves Historic Win in Uttar Pradesh
In the 2024 national polls, the Samajwadi Party (SP) secured a significant victory in Uttar Pradesh, winning 37 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats. This marks the party’s best performance to date. In contrast, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) saw its seat count decline sharply, falling from 62 in 2019 to just 33, resulting in the party’s overall representation in Parliament dropping below the majority mark for the first time since 2014. The Congress party, an ally of SP, also improved its standing, increasing its seat count from one to six.
Despite electoral setbacks since 2014, SP has increased its vote share since 2017. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the SP-Congress alliance was ahead in 224 of 403 assembly segments. The BJP polled 38.30 million votes and SP 38.16 million. In the 2022 assembly polls, the BJP and SP polled 41.3 and 32.1% of the vote.
