“We dreamed of changing the world, was it the world that changed us? » asked Sylvain Lelièvre. It’s this song that I’ve been thinking about since Émilise Lessard-Therrien announced her departure from Québec solidaire (QS). This worrying announcement comes just a few months after the release of Catherine Dorion’s disturbing book, and after the announcement of a significant decline for QS in the polls. This party created to defend popular interests today seems engaged in a path which marks the forgetting of its founding principles, principles which I believe are important to recall.
A party-process
Québec solidaire is the result of a merger in 2006 between Citizen Option (built following the World March of Women in 2000) and the Union of Progressive Forces (UFP), a party which itself brought together three socialist parties or popular. This new party wanted to avoid the trap of parliamentary professionalization and electoralism by remaining a “party of the ballot box and the street” making the link between social struggles and electoral politics. He wanted to “do politics differently” by relying on a strong internal democracy, quite the opposite of the hierarchical and hypercentralized organization that prevails in the other parties.
This is why QS chose to appoint equal spokespersons (a woman and a man) and not an omnipotent leader. Finally, it wanted to be a “process party”, closer to the social movement than to suit-and-tie parliamentarism, seeking to constantly surpass itself with the aim of becoming a mass left party.
A necessary rooting outside of mainland France
The party has established itself in recent years in urban areas and among the educated electorate. The next step logically called for its roots in what we call a little awkwardly “the regions”. This implied linking the party’s discourse to popular regional, agricultural, rural sensitivities and concerns, etc. This is not what was decided by the party strategists, and for the first time in its history, in 2022 it suffered a setback in terms of percentage and number of votes, particularly in the regions.
The figure of Émilise Lessard-Therrien, elected female spokesperson last November, embodied the synthesis of regional concerns, and she did so with a refreshing and rare authenticity. His election was enough to arouse the enthusiasm of those who, like the author of these lines, live in rural areas, and it gave the party the opportunity to enter the next phase of its growth process. However, that is not what happened.
A trend towards centralization
It took only five months for Lessard-Therrien to leave his position after professional burnout and deep disappointment. Her departure speech identifies an “organizational blockage” which prevented her from bringing into the party the concerns she voiced. Catherine Dorion had already raised several problems in her book. Now another woman, this time the female spokesperson, is leaving, saying that the party has, so to speak, “tabletted” her and relegated to the background, without giving her the space, resources and support. space to showcase what she wanted to wear. She also evokes a small team united around the male spokesperson, and who would exercise disproportionate power in the party.
Paulo Freire underlined the risk that a left-wing party would end up only asking the people to applaud a “great leader” gesturing on a platform, whereas the people should play a conscious and active role in their own care and their own emancipation. This was the belief of the founding members of QS. Unfortunately, we have witnessed a gradual adaptation to centralizing, hierarchical and patriarchal parliamentary institutions, with early ideals gradually giving way to conformist professionalization.
An example of what is wrong seems to me to be well embodied in the “Meta scandal”. The party seems to have become dependent on GAFAM advertising tools to the point of placing its discourse in the wake of data and microtargeting. Rather than speaking to Quebec as a whole, he sends targeted messages to targeted electoral constituencies via IT. This leads him to lock himself in a bubble where he will address the urban-educated-green electorate who already support him.
He will then be able to make some gains in urban or peri-urban areas, but he will repeat the historic error of the European lefts who abandoned the periphery to only address a “bobo” and cosmopolitan electorate with an out-of-ground discourse. The inability to address the concerns of the working classes, the regions and rural areas will produce an uprooted discourse which will paradoxically distance the people from the party that wanted to be popular. There is no other way to explain the current rise of the PQ.
What have we done with our dreams?
Obviously, opponents of QS will want to take advantage of the current situation to present themselves as being more virtuous. They must be reminded that Québec solidaire was precisely created because traditional parties proved incapable of freeing Quebecers from the domination of federalist and capitalist interests. Some of them openly act as lackeys of the federalist and capitalist oligarchy while others, like the PQ, have claimed to free us from it and then embrace the ideas of neoliberal globalization. Let them therefore keep themselves a little embarrassed, because they themselves have been plagued for a long time by the hierarchical, electoralist and centralizing diseases which today seem to threaten QS.
Pierre Bourgault said that a party must remain “faithful to the dreams that gave birth to it”. If it turns out that Québec solidaire is incapable of remaining faithful to its founding ideals because it is the victim of an internal technocratic coup d’état, if it is satisfied with a few winnable counties in urban areas, another movement or organization takes over to root the social and political struggle across Quebec.
To avoid the vertical trap of centralization and electoralism, it would be appropriate, as the ecologist Murray Bookchin thought, to focus first on democracy, decentralization and local self-organization. In terms of ideas, the philosopher Chantal Mouffe, who notably advised Podemos and Mélenchon, insists on the importance of developing a discourse that reflects popular affects, sensitivity and insecurities.
Review Bias, in the 1960s, established the three keys to liberate the Quebec people: socialism, independence, secularism. Québec solidaire seems to have gradually deserted these three key ideas. For example, he only knows how to speak of independence by constantly apologizing for the fact that this idea may be insufficiently “inclusive”, as the liberal and postmodern spirit of our time wants. On the contrary, it should be the bearer of the necessary synthesis between the national question and the social question. The people are not mistaken and do not adhere to this disembodied discourse, which seems above all to be addressed to urban graduates who fomented it among themselves and with the aim of addressing themselves. .
Now, Plato said that what differentiates the good ruler from the bad comes down to the question of knowing whether one governs for the good of the city or for one’s own good. In other words, one should not engage in politics for oneself or for one’s own advancement. We did not found this party so that it would be under the authority of a single individual or a small self-satisfied clique, but what Pierre Vadeboncoeur called “the authority of the people”; it would be the mark of a party that wants to be popular in every sense of the word.