Some speak of a coalition in the style of the CAQ, which shattered the Liberal-PQ divide. Others evoke Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche, which engulfed the political center in France and shattered the traditional parties.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
But the fact remains that in the entourage of Jean Charest, the hypothesis of a kind of center-right coalition has been openly discussed for several weeks.
Tasha Kheiriddin evoked Sunday the hypothesis of a “conservative-liberal” coalition, in an interview with Radio-Canada on the occasion of the publication of her essay on the future of the Conservative Party of Canada (The Right Pathwhich will be “Le droit chemin” in French).
Kheiriddin, a conservative political commentator, works as a strategist in the Charest team.
She insists that Plan A is to win leadership and unite the party. But is it really realistic?
On the one hand, Pierre Poilievre seems to be leading strongly among registered members. The road to victory for Charest is narrow and goes through a complicated second round.
On the other hand, even by winning, Charest would find himself with a strongly divided party and a very hostile fringe towards him. The chances of success of a unification enterprise do not seem very high at the moment.
Here is what Kheiriddin writes, translated by Radio-Canada: “Given the acerbic climate which reigns in the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party, it will be very difficult for the supporters of one of the two camps to live in harmony with the other field. A centrist party will alienate populists. And vice versa. There is a third possibility: the recreation of a liberal-conservative party, like the one that founded Canada. »
Charest does not hide his aversion to Poilievre, who wants to fight inflation by buying cryptocurrency, fire the (independent) governor of the Bank of Canada and who encouraged the anarchoconservative convoy that blocked Ottawa last winter.
Poilievre pays him back, blaming him for policies worthy of the Liberal Party OF QUEBEC (read: “leftist”) and questionable ethics.
Charest presents himself as the only one capable of beating the Liberals, after three Conservative defeats, Poilievre being too extremist, populist and economically crazy to conquer the major centres.
If Charest wins on September 10, we may very well find ourselves faced with another schism, led by the “poilievrists”, like the one that had seen the Reform Party arise in the West. In 1993, the party had won 52 seats, the Conservatives (then Progressive Conservatives)… 2. The division of the right and the presence of the Bloc Québécois allowed the Liberals to govern without worries for 13 years.
If Poilievre wins, as seems likely, Charest won’t necessarily throw in the towel. A relative of his campaign told me last month to think about the Macron hypothesis. Charest would then have to leave a party that would look like a beige copy of the American Republican Party. Next, he would have to try to rally the moderate conservatives and the fiscally liberal liberals at the center angered by Trudeau’s de facto union with the New Democratic Party.
It is bet on the fact that the era of the “old parties” has been in decline for 50 years, as observed by political scientists. The voter no longer has historical loyalty to a party, and trust in parties themselves is declining everywhere in constitutional democracies.
Can an old politician like Charest destroy the system by pretending to renovate it? François Legault also had a political past, albeit less important, when he left the Parti Québécois to join forces with Liberals and ADQists to form his coalition, and get the political debate out of the binary sovereignist-federalist dilemma. Legault, however, had the significant advantage of not dragging all the liberal pots that Charest tries to forget as “settled”, but which remain a major liability in Quebec. Be that as it may, this is the path that those around him are considering.
In short, the campaign to appoint the next Conservative leader is only the first act, not the epilogue. What is being prepared, the plan B which is being discussed, is a possible in-depth reconfiguration of the federal partisan political map.