Summer heat turns up for PQ leader Lisée
Regardless of what the summer weather will be like for the rest of us, a heat warning should already have been issued for Jean-François Lisée.
The heat on the Parti Québécois leader will rise to an uncomfortable degree by early September. That’s when Lisée will face a party convention where delegates will vote on his leadership and his proposed policy program. And PQ conventions have always been unpredictable.
Officially, the leader can be forced to step down only if he or she fails to receive a simple majority in the confidence vote. But at the 2005 convention, Bernard Landry was stunned by a confidence vote of 76.2 per cent, which he deemed insufficient, and resigned. That’s the standard to which Lisée’s vote will be compared. And even if his leadership survives, part of his program may not.
Lisée’s authority as leader has been shaky from the start; in the leadership election last year, he was the first choice of less than half the party members who voted, and he was elected on the second ballot with only 51 per cent. Practically speaking, that means he started out with half his party against him.
He has been at the head of his party for less than a year, and has yet to lead it into a general election. For the most part, however, his leadership already looks like a failure.
He suffered a humiliating setback last month when the small, left-wing, pro-independence Québec Solidaire party spurned his persistent overtures toward an alliance in the general election due by October 2018.
He has been obsessed with the Solidaire vote — which, incidentally or not, threatens him personally in his east Montreal riding of Rosemont. The proposed policy program to which he has committed himself leans to the left.
He has not stopped QS, however, from making gains in the polls at the expense of his party. Péquistes can see their party also losing ground to the soft-nationalist Coalition Avenir Québec party on its right.
The poll results made public this week can’t predict the outcome of a general election that Premier Philippe Couillard insists is still more than a year off.
Even outside of election campaigns, however, polls influence media coverage and the morale of party members. If a party has a poor showing, the media and the members usually find an explanation in the leader’s performance.
Poll results published just before summer vacations can be especially influential on what party members hear around the barbecue from family and friends, and from each other. And this week’s poll results are bad for the PQ and its leader.
They confirm that Lisée’s signature strategy of ruling out a secession referendum in the first term of a PQ government has backfired.
The strategy appears to have been only a half-success, in ending the polarization over the referendum that favoured the federalist Liberals. In ending that polarization, however, Lisée has enhanced the multipartyism of Quebec provincial politics at the expense of the PQ.
The poll results confirm a trend since Lisée became PQ leader: Support for the party has steadily declined to what would be a record low for it in a general election, and it has been replaced as the leading alternative to the Liberals by the Coalition.
Increasingly, Lisée’s PQ reminds one of former leader André Boisclair’s a decade ago. In an attempt to rejuvenate itself, the already-aging party softened its nationalist identity, added a touch of environmental green to its logo, and fell to third-party status in the 2007 general election.
To Péquistes this summer, that past must look like their party’s future.