The election campaign that is getting underway in Quebec is very special. Although five parties are vying for representation in the National Assembly, only one seems able to claim a plurality of 125 seats. The re-election of the outgoing government thus seems assured. Such a situation has not occurred since 1989. The Liberal Party of Quebec, then led by Robert Bourassa, had sailed towards victory against a Parti Québécois still in full reconstruction after its defeat in 1985. However, in 1989, the PLQ won 92 seats and 50% of the popular vote, despite the emergence of the Equality Party, dedicated to defending the rights of the English-speaking minority.
If François Legault’s Coalition avenir Québec can afford to dream of winning as many seats as the PLQ in 1989, thanks to an electoral system that Mr. Legault had promised to reform before abandoning the idea during his first mandate, indicates that the proportion of voters preparing to vote for this party remains well below the 50% threshold. What temper the triumphalism which seems to have already won the ranks caquistes. The CAQ dominates Quebec politics in part thanks to a fractured opposition like never before. The October 3 election will therefore be a moment of truth for each of the four parties hoping to establish themselves as the true democratic alternative to the CAQ… in 2026.
“Can we imagine that a party, in 2022, will have an electoral campaign where it will promise to hold a referendum if it is elected? asked former PQ Premier Lucien Bouchard last June, who deplored the “lack of realism” of the PQ under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. The latter prefers to maintain the fantasy that Quebecers would be ready to take up the sovereignist torch if only we told them more about it. But as former PQ minister Bernard Drainville noted when announcing his candidacy for the CAQ last June, Quebecers are currently “elsewhere”. Mr. Plamondon’s challenge during this campaign will be to prevent the disappearance of his party. Far from being a fairy tale, this campaign risks turning into a horror story for “Team Cinderella”.
By taking up in his platform several of the themes favored by the Action démocratique du Québec, including increasing the role of the private sector in health care or education vouchers, the leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime, is trying to reconnect with ADQ voters of the past who no longer identify with the CAQ. This last formation, which merged with the ADQ in 2012, has become over time a rather conventional party. The reformist spirit of the ADQ did not survive the marriage of convenience. If Mr. Duhaime has proven one thing over the past six months, it’s that the pool of Quebec voters is larger than we thought on the right. If he runs a good campaign, and if the PCQ candidates don’t make too many blunders, Mr. Duhaime could become the political revelation of the year.
Also last June, Lucien Bouchard said he was “unhappy” to see what has happened to the Quebec Liberal Party in recent years. This “great party”, which had “left a great heritage to Quebecers”, no longer knows what it exists for. It is far from being exclusively the fault of its leader, Dominique Anglade. The PLQ’s identity crisis is the result of the party’s anti-nationalist turn under Philippe Couillard, a turn that paved the way for the CAQ. The PLQ, said Mr. Bouchard, is “a coalition of nationalist, but federalist, Francophones with Anglophones and the communities [culturelles]. It is a coalition. And it takes a goldsmith to manage a coalition. They had it with Robert Bourassa, [et] they would have had it with Mario Dumont”.
For meme Anglade, the objective of this campaign is to save the furniture. The PLQ must at least keep its English-speaking strongholds in Montreal while preserving several ridings with a French-speaking majority, including that of M.me Anglade, Saint-Henri–Sainte-Anne. On Sunday, Mr. Legault succeeded in significantly increasing the political benefit of Mr.me Anglade calling her “this lady”. But she cannot count on the nerdyness of the CAQ leader to get her party out of the no man’s land where he is at the start of the campaign. If the PLQ does not succeed in forming the official opposition after October 3, its marginalization will have been confirmed.
For his party to become the official opposition in the National Assembly, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois will have to deliver the performance of his life during this campaign. No one doubts that he can do it. But if, at 32, the co-spokesperson for Québec solidaire seems to have the makings of an opposition leader and the stature of a future prime minister, his party does not yet seem to have entered into adulthood. During the QS convention last November, Mr. Nadeau-Dubois said that his party had to “prepare to govern”. But the militants of QS, including those of the Collectif Tendance marxiste internationale, do not seem to want to allow Mr. Nadeau-Dubois to make their formation a party in which a majority of Quebecers could identify. Like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Ecological and Social Union (NUPES) in France, QS could hope to unite the Quebec left during this campaign. But there’s no indication that that would be enough to make it a real CAQ replacement this time around.