On Saturday, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav and Bahujan Samajwadi Party supremo Mayawati have announced their tie-up for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. They clarified that they will contest on 38 seats each. The press conference, held at Lucknow Hotel Taj, was the first Yadav has addressed since his 2017 joint presser with Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for the assembly elections.
This will be exactly after 25 years that both the parties will be coming together to contest the elections against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Earlier, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Kanshi Ram had joined hands to contest the elections and had registered a massive victory.
Yadav and Mayawati had given their ‘in principle’ approval to the alliance, which has shut its doors to the Congress in the state. Sources have informed that both SP and BSP are planning to contest on 37 seats each out of the 80 on offer in Uttar Pradesh and plan to leave just two- Rae Bareli and Amethi, the bastions of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi for the Congress, an offer that the grand old party is unlikely to accept.
According to BJP own calculations, an SP-BSP alliance may cost the party at least 25-30 seats in the state in the general elections. The BJP and its allies had won 73 of the 80 seats in the 2014 parliamentary elections.