2009 Odisha Legislative Assembly election

In the 2004 Orissa Assembly election, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had swept the state with the BJD winning 61 seats and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning 32 seats, giving the alliance comfortable majority in the 147-member house. This was the second consecutive term for the BJD-BJP combine after they first formed the government in 2000.[3] The Naveen Patnaik government had been sworn in at the Bhubaneswar Raj Bhavan by Odisha Governor M. M. Rajendran in May 2004.[4]

With the tenure of the Orissa Assembly scheduled to expire on 29 June 2009, the Election Commission of India announced[5] on 2 March that year that the elections to the Assembly would be held alongside the general election. The election in each Assembly constituency (AC) was held in the same phase as the election to the corresponding Parliamentary constituency that the AC fell under.

Seat-sharing discussions got underway between allies, after eleven years of partnership and nearly two full terms as the Orissa state government, the BJD snapped ties with the BJP in March 2009, blaming the latter for the 2008 violence against Christians.[6] Thereafter, the BJP withdrew support to Government and Governor Murlidhar Chandrakant Bhandare asked Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to prove his majority in the Orissa Assembly.[7] Naveen Patnaik then won a controversial trust vote on 11 March 2009, after the opposition Congress and BJP legislators walked out of the Assembly in protest in the manner the vote was being conducted.[8]

The BJD then declared that they support neither Congress nor BJP.[9] Though they decided to contest the 2009 elections in partnership with the Left Front and Nationalist Congress Party, the BJD did not officially join the Third Front.[10]

• State Assembly elections in India, 2009
• Indian general election in Orissa, 2009
• Legislative Assembly election results of Orissa