Nearly 50 years after Bal Thackeray launched the Shiv Sena party in Maharashtra, a Thackeray will finally contest an election. Ironically, the Thackeray in question is the late Sena chief’s estranged nephew and founder of rival party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Raj Thackeray.

On Saturday, at his first public rally in Mumbai after his party's resounding failure in the Lok Sabha election, Raj announced that he would stand for the upcoming assembly election in Maharashtra and even projected himself as the chief ministerial candidate.

Not to be outflanked, a spokesman for the Shiv Sena on Sunday declared that Uddhav Thackeray would the party's chief ministerial candidate, but he failed to clarify whether the party chief would actually stand for elections.

Given the MNS’s wipe-out in the 2014 general election – the party lost every single seat from which it contested – it is evident that the purpose of Raj’s declarations is to unsettle the Shiv Sena and eat into its vote share. In the 2009 assembly election, the MNS had successfully split the votes that would have otherwise gone to the Sena, and it hopes to replicate that situation this year by spinning a Modi-style, personality-driven campaign focusing on Raj Thackeray.

If the MNS agenda is successful, the Sena is likely to win fewer seats than its alliance partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party, effectively ruining the Sena’s dream of seeing its own candidate in the chief minister’s chair.

But does the MNS pose a genuine threat to the Shiv Sena’s vote share? Political commentators and rivals believe that is very unlikely, partly because Raj’s own personality will come in the way.

“Raj Thackeray has been a very lethargic politician and even when he was in the Shiv Sena, he played a very marginal role in leading the party to victory,” said political writer and observer Prakash Bal. Ever since he founded the MNS in 2006, he says, Raj has been unable to explain what "navnirman" or rejuvenation he intends to bring to the state. “Why, then, would people put him in power?” asked Bal.

The MNS does not have a very strong presence outside of Mumbai, Thane and Nashik, and Raj himself plans to contest from Nashik and Mumbai’s Marathi stronghold, Dadar-Mahim.

“Raj has good reason to believe that he can lead from the front, because politics is about the ability to mobilise, organise and galvanise,” said senior journalist Kumar Ketkar. While his cousin Uddhav Thackeray merely inherited the whole organisation of the Shiv Sena, Raj managed to create a small wave of his own. “By throwing himself in the ring, he has added some tadka to the dal that was being cooked in Maharashtra politics,” said Ketkar.

The excitement, however, is likely to be superficial. “Good oratory skills do not make one a good leader – you need to build organisations,” said Bal. So far, most of Raj’s election campaigning has consisted of criticising his rivals. “But people don’t remember all this, they just want their problems solved,” said Bal.

The MNS’s political rivals do not perceive Raj and his party to be a threat of any kind in the assembly polls. “It is the only major party in Maharashtra that lost such a huge chunk of its vote share from 2009 to 2014,” said Madhav Bhandari, a spokesperson for the BJP in Maharashtra.

The Congress, which faces its own challenges after the BJP-Sena alliance swept 42 of Maharashtra’s 48 Lok Sabha seats this year, has chosen to diplomatically welcome Raj into the fray. “The Thackerays never seemed to believe in the democratic principle, so having Raj Thackeray contest the election himself is a good sign,” said state Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant.