In a nail-biting finish, V Muraleedharan has won Kazhakkoottam for the BJP with a razor-thin margin of 428 votes. During counting, sitting CPM MLA Kadakampally Surendran led in 16 of the 19 rounds. Muraleedharan turned the tables in the 17th and 18th rounds, eventually edging past the incumbent to seal the victory.

Kazhakkoottam has emerged as one of Kerala’s most closely watched constituencies, evolving from a traditional UDF–LDF contest into a high-stakes triangular battle. While Nemom marked the BJP’s first breakthrough in the state, Kazhakkoottam had become a parallel front where the party has steadily expanded its footprint — a trajectory that has now culminated in a narrow but significant win.

In the 2026 election, the contest featured CPM’s Kadakampally Surendran, BJP leader and former Union Minister V Muraleedharan, and Congress candidate T Sarathchandra Prasad. Surendran eventually finished second, with the Congress trailing in third place. Exit polls had indicated a tight race with no clear frontrunner, a trend reflected in the final outcome.

The electoral trajectory of Kazhakkoottam mirrors a structural shift similar to Nemom, though it had not delivered a BJP win until now. In 2011, the BJP was a marginal player with just 6.86% of the vote. By 2016, it registered a sharp surge, with V Muraleedharan securing 31.90% and emerging as the runner-up, pushing Congress’s sitting MLA M A Vaheed to third place. In 2021, despite a broader LDF advantage across the state, the BJP retained its second position in the constituency with 29.06% of the vote through Sobha Surendran.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Rajeev Chandrasekhar finished ahead in the Kazhakkoottam Assembly segment, along with Vattiyoorkavu and Nemom, outperforming Congress candidate Shashi Tharoor in these pockets. The rise of Narendra Modi at the national level, along with the Technopark-driven transformation of what was once a largely rural constituency into an urban hub, has contributed to the BJP’s growth in the area.

Kadakampally Surendran had held the seat for two consecutive terms, in 2016 and 2021, anchoring the LDF’s position. In 2021, he secured a comfortable victory with 46.04% of the vote, winning by a margin of 23,497 votes. In 2016, he had won by 7,347 votes with a vote share of 37.38%.

Once a Congress stronghold under M A Vaheed, who won the seat in 2001, 2006 and 2011, Kazhakkoottam has seen a steady erosion of UDF support. In 2001, Vaheed had contested as a Congress rebel and defeated both the Congress and the CPM, before returning to the party. The Congress vote share dropped from 46.38% in 2011 to 28.82% in 2016 and further to 23.85% in 2021, indicating that a significant portion of the anti-LDF vote has shifted towards the BJP.