The Samajwadi Party (SP) has announced that its president, Akhilesh Yadav, and his uncle, Shivpal Yadav, will jointly campaign for the upcoming municipal elections in Uttar Pradesh. This will be the first time since 2016 that they have done so. The party has also said that Akhilesh Yadav and MP Dimple Yadav will each hold three open forums in support of Vandana Mishra, the party’s nominee for mayor of Lucknow.
Shivpal Yadav has already begun his campaign, traversing the Yadav strongholds of Etawah, Mainpuri, and Firozabad. He will work alongside Akhilesh in these areas. Shivpal Yadav last participated in party election campaigning during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, until the Yadav family dispute broke out in 2016–17. Shivpal and Akhilesh finally became estranged as a result of the subsequent feud.
Shivpal, on the other hand, campaigned exclusively alongside Akhilesh for the Karhal assembly seat after joining up with the SP in the 2022 elections. Just a month after Mulayam Singh Yadav’s passing on October 10th, Shivpal re-joined the SP. He campaigned with Akhilesh for Dimple Yadav’s Mainpuri Lok Sabha by-election in December 2022.
Akhilesh is in charge of organizing teams to support the party’s candidates for mayor, nagar palika chairperson, and nagar panchayat chairman, while Shivpal will oversee the SP campaign in BJP strongholds. In SP strongholds Mainpuri, Kannauj, Etawah, and Firozabad, Akhilesh and Shivpal will be visible together, while Dimple Yadav is likely to campaign for the party candidates in her Lok Sabha district Mainpuri.
Along with RLD leader Jayant Chaudhary, Akhilesh would also campaign for SP and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) candidates in western Uttar Pradesh. The SP has vowed to vigorously challenge the elections for the state’s urban local bodies.
On May 4 and 11, there will be two rounds of voting for Nagar Nigam, Nagar Palika parishads, and Nagar panchayats. On May 13, the results will be tallied. On May 4, voters in 37 districts across nine divisions (Saharanpur, Moradabad, Agra, Jhansi, Prayagraj, Lucknow, Devipatan, Gorakhpur, and Varanasi) will cast their ballots in the first round of voting.