Parti Quebecois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon speaks to supporters after winning the provincial election in Montreal, on Oct. 5. St-Pierre Plamondon’s election-night speech focused first on compromise and broadening support.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
The Parti Québécois’s by-election victory in the Jean-Talon riding three years ago came to be seen as the symbolic canary-in-a-coal-mine start of the fall of the governing Coalition Avenir Québec – and the resurgence of the PQ.
For a long time, it had seemed like PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon would ride that resurgence into a majority government. But on Monday night, the PQ lost Jean-Talon to a Quebec Liberal Party candidate – and didn’t take any seats in the Quebec City area.
The PQ was first to capitalize on a desire for change. But they struggled to keep Quebeckers with them.
Now, Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon is a 28-per-cent premier. The PQ won with a record-low popular vote.
Over the past four years, Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon had led his party from three seats in the 2022 election to an impressive revival.
But the closer voters got to casting a ballot, the more they pulled back from the prospect of voting for Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon. It was a recoil against a future referendum, certainly, but opinion polls released just before election day also suggested the leader is less popular than his party. The next premier doesn’t have a wave behind him.
Now Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon, widely known as PSPP, has a minority government.
It is relatively stable because there are three opposition parties who would have to combine to defeat it in the National Assembly. But it comes with a peculiar conundrum for the next premier.
Five takeaways from the Quebec election results
He has to work with other parties to govern, to build the broader support he needs to stay in power and get to his goal of holding a referendum after U.S. President Donald Trump leaves the White House in 2029. But if he wants to win that referendum, he also needs to repolarize the Quebec electorate.
Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon’s election-night speech focused first on compromise and broadening support. He promised to include elements from the platforms of all opposition parties in the PQ budget. But PSPP has a talent for attention-grabbing wedge-politics moves – when he was first elected in 2022, it was refusing to swear an oath to the King. And his political goals require him to both build bridges and burn them.
Despite what the results map looks like, dominated by 59 Péquistes and 40 Liberals, Monday’s election was not an atavistic return to the separatist-federalist divide that dominated Quebec politics for decades.
The dominant dynamic was the desire for change and the crash of the CAQ, the party that under former premier François Legault had promoted the troisieme voie – a third way, an autonomist and nationalist posture that eschewed separatism as a sterile debate getting in the way of Quebec’s progress.
That desire for change had been what propelled the PQ over the past three years, especially because the Quebec Liberals were still a non-option for most francophones. But when push came to shove, and the CAQ won only 13 per cent of the vote and not a single seat – another 20 per cent rushed to a different party using third-way rhetoric, the Quebec Conservative Party.
If PSPP is to set the winning conditions for a referendum he’ll have to polarize those third-way voters to make them feel they must choose between separatism and federalism. But he would have to do so without making Quebeckers think he is doing the very thing they didn’t want – that is, putting fights with Ottawa and the drive to a referendum ahead of governing.
It’s hard to guess which way Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon will turn now to govern.
There is another sovereigntist party, which holds nine seats and the balance of power in the National Assembly, Québec Solidaire, but it is devoted to progressive causes and its own ways and not guaranteed to back a PQ referendum. It’s possible that PSPP could turn leftwards to try to woo them, but that would also alienate the new power in Quebec politics, the Conservative Party led by Éric Duhaime that swept most of the Quebec City region.
That’s enough of a puzzle to keep any new premier busy. We can expect Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon will build on complaints about the federation as a foil for the complexities of governing in Quebec, and disrupt the relative federal-provincial peace that Prime Minister Mark Carney has enjoyed.
The PQ is back, certainly. But so far, at least, PSPP doesn’t have a lot of people power behind him.