The percentages have been falling steeply since Monday evening to demonstrate who is right or wrong to be contrite or happy with the passage of Hurricane François. I will focus on the raw numbers. First, the number of additional voters to have chosen the CAQ, compared to 2018: exactly 176,098.
That’s a lot, especially since at an almost equivalent turnout, to within half a percentage point, there were only 133,017 new voters to take. It’s a lot, too, because the CAQ product was remarkably cutesy compared to its previous product. In 2018, she embodied the change deemed essential, after liberal years having combined the toxic triptych smells of corruption-brutal austerity-contempt for identity issues. The Legault team then offered itself as the effervescent and refreshing drink after years of ethical, budgetary and national drought.
In 2022, there was nothing sparkling about the new CAQ. Without the slightest inhibition, the government praised the merits of warm water to us. Let’s go on. What to do ? As before was the answer, but for longer. A tablet government or, as they say in restaurants, “chambered”.
We must do justice to the CAQ strategists who have, upstream, well understood the electoral mood. It takes daring to think that lukewarm water is trendy, that you can hold a whole campaign promising almost nothing else and even hoping to expand your market share with such a tasteless product.
And yet, without François Legault’s inability to speak properly about immigration, without Jean Boulet’s unacceptable brain bubble, throwing voters who had been well-disposed until then into the arms of liberals and solidarity, the CAQ could have deployed its stale empire over three or four other ridings, particularly on the island of Montreal.
The crux of the poll, then, was that people’s thirst for lukewarm water was such that it mostly held, and even grew stronger, despite buyers admitting to pollsters that they had been exposed by the CAQ. to the worst of all the advertising campaigns of the brands present and, certainly, to the worst of the campaigns that the CAQ has presented since its birth. That, Monsieur, Madame, is thirst.
Real flavors were available though. And we must recognize that the minority product with the strongest growth offered one of the drinks with the highest content of political TNT: Éric Duhaime’s Conservative Party of Quebec. The former radio host attracted no less than 471,836 more voters to his fold than his predecessor did in 2018. If he had paid his taxes, his Hydro and his cable on time, we bet that he would enter the Assembly as the victor.
But he, who has, in one year, created a political force arousing popular support almost equivalent to the three other opposition parties, is banned by our voting system, condemned to prowl around parliament to find a microphone or a camera, repelled by this injustice towards its radicalized and conspiratorial fringe, inevitably finding in this iniquitous result more reasons to take to the streets and reject the system. A mess.
A Prime Minister truly inhabited by the imperative of social cohesion would draw immediate conclusions from this on the necessary reform of the ballot. We have rather attended, as of Tuesday, by Sonia LeBel and Bernard Drainville (former former Minister responsible for Democratic Institutions and Citizen Participation), to slamming of doors.
Among the other flavors present in the electoral vending machine, there was the liberal in Dominique packaging, dynamic as one could wish. Compared to the previous packaging, beige-Couillard, it nevertheless found 410,030 fewer takers. We can think that the downward correction of the liberal market share was not fully integrated in 2018 and that it is now reaching its real equilibrium point. Despite this slide in sales, the Liberal results establish an equation that could be stable: in Quebec, Francophones elect the government; non-francophones, the official opposition.
What is most astonishing in the behavior of voters is their refusal to grant even minor growth to products, admittedly in the minority, but very typical of which the public should be there.
Québec solidaire has a certain generational appeal, “GND” has been the darling of the media for two good years and its party should be pushed upwards by two combined waves: the woke and the climate. Why then, despite this buoyant and hyper-mediatized climate, has the party of co-spokespersons lost troops since 2018, exactly 14,991 voters to be precise? Seriously, I can’t explain it.
Ditto for the PQ, abandoned by 87,309 voters. In the last election, one could understand the desire to group together behind the CAQ, sometimes holding one’s nose, to be sure to block the Liberals. In addition, the PQ leader at the time, whom I am not naming out of pure Christian charity, was accused of hiding sovereignty, of being soo-so on his tongue and never going out without a sedan chair. “PSPP” was on the contrary the revelation of the campaign, its advertisements alternated between the announcement of the linguistic slaughter and the promise of the awakening of the independence giant in the middle of the year René Lévesque. And he had fewer voters?
It is clear that the big hand of the Quebec clock points firmly to the “quiet” hour rather than the “revolution” hour. In these cases, we console ourselves with the sayings: “We must beware of sleeping water. »
We comfort each other as best we can.
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