The election campaign is a thing of the past, to the great relief of many who could no longer bear the news bulletins filled with promises, thundering declarations, fact checking suspicious, but necessary, of blunders of the day tracked down at dawn.
Posted at 10:00 a.m.
The chiefs’ buses are put away. A CAQ government with such a majority has just been elected for the next four years that this mandate will flow like a long calm river…
Mistake.
It’s October 4, the government hasn’t even been sworn in and the next elections are starting to play out now. The political scene of the next few months, years, will be anything but a bucolic promenade. The 2026 elections are preparing fast!
Will François Legault still be there in four years? He led a grumpy, muddled, dissonant campaign for a presumed winner. If he liked his job, he didn’t say it to his face. He looked like someone who could announce his retirement from political life mid-term. We already feel that some are prancing around for the challenger at the head of the party. The PM is aging quickly and badly.
Despite its sparkling majority, but a vote rate for the CAQ of 41% (at the time of writing these lines), it is today, within the party, the beginning of a haunting little mumbled refrain: ” but when will he leave? »
QS lined up to be the official opposition. It is therefore the PLQ that will play this role, even if QS and the PQ have accumulated, in percentage, a higher score. And that the PCQ, which did not elect anyone, is not far behind. QS is therefore only ONE of the three oppositions. The PQ again embodies nationalism, the PLQ walks on the toes of the progressives. QS’s momentum is stalled for now. The talented GND is however here to stay, but will have to review the strategy, be more decision-making, which will be difficult given the structures of his party.
The PQ is not dead, let’s make amends. PSPP could, by its modernity, its approach, its calm, its sense of pedagogy, mark Quebec politics, beyond its party. He contrasts with the other leaders, and should promote transpartisan impulses. He is in politics to stay there, and mark it, whatever happens to the PQ in the medium term.
Dominique Anglade will be the leader of a deeply local official opposition. This brilliant woman will have to achieve a profound overhaul of her party, torn between two generations and still dependent on a heavy past. But will she stay?
The angry voice of Éric Duhaime’s voters will not be channeled into the election of their leader to the National Assembly. With their 13% of votes, PCQ supporters will be heard outside, on Radio X, in demonstrations, on even more toxic social networks. Visceral and radical dissatisfaction has a bright future ahead of it, under the leadership of Duhaime, who will remain determined.
With Monday’s election, and perhaps even with a hypothetical reform of the voting system, none of the five parties, not even the omnipotent CAQ, alone represents all the complexity of Quebec. Everyone – the CAQ, everywhere except Montreal, the PLQ in the West Island, the PCQ in Quebec and Beauce, QS in the metropolis, the PQ in hearts and little on the map – bet on regional disparities , local electoral characteristics. It won’t be very healthy. It accelerates the divisions between Montreal and the regions, fuels mutual incomprehension and accentuates the fractures between us.
Many will therefore mention the “necessary” reform of the voting system. The pressure will be strong on the CAQ to at least integrate a part of proportional to our first-past-the-post system. The framework of the current system was built for bipartisanship. It will be necessary to remember that ALL the parties of power have always retreated. With its majority, the CAQ will be deaf. But five active and varied parties, including one sentenced to crumbs and the other absent from the National Assembly despite significant percentages of votes, lead to a lot of cynicism and democratic resignation in the population.
It’s October 4, 2022. For party strategists, it’s somewhere in 2024, if not 2026. This seemingly stable and unchanging powder-blue map of Quebec hides abysses of surprises. The tectonic plates of politics have just inexorably started moving again…