Quebec is looking at potential political realignment

Before the April 7 Quebec general election, it was widely assumed that the Coalition Avenir Québec party would not do well, and that as a result, its founder, François Legault, would step down.

By most measurements, the CAQ did not do well. Although it did gain three seats in the National Assembly compared with the previous election in 2012, its share of the overall vote declined.

And with a Liberal majority government in power, the CAQ might remain the third party in the Assembly for the next four years.

When Legault founded the Coalition in 2011, he said he was giving himself 10 years to achieve power so that he could apply his program.

By the time the next gener- al election is due in October 2018, seven of those 10 years will have passed, and Legault might be no closer to the premier’s office than he was when he founded his party.

Still, Legault is hanging on. And he has a good reason for doing so: the uncertain future of the Parti Québécois, which could create opportunities for the CAQ.

The PQ is not dead yet. It finished second in seats as well as votes in the election, so it will be the official opposition in the new legislature.

Still, the election left the PQ in a state of crisis.

It received only 25.4 per cent of the vote, its smallest vote share since the PQ’s first general election in 1970.

It must choose a new leader to replace Pauline Marois, who stepped down on election night.

And it must decide what to do about sovereignty, the goal that holds the PQ together, but which is an increasingly heavy electoral handicap for the party.

Either question, leadership or sovereignty, is enough to split the PQ permanently. Now it must address both those questions at the same time, over a drawn-out period that could last a year or more.

Leadership contests are divisive in any party, and are especially bitter in the PQ.

On election night, the knives had already been drawn in campaign-style speeches by Bernard Drainville, Jean-François Lisée and Pierre Karl Péladeau before Marois could even confirm her resignation.

For the next year or so, the PQ might be so distracted by its internal divisions that it allows the CAQ to step in as what Legault calls the “real” opposition in the Assembly.

There’s even a possibility that the Coalition might go on to replace the PQ permanently.

One defeated PQ minister is among those who believe the April 7 election may prove to be another “realignment election.”

That’s what political scientist Vincent Lemieux of Université Laval called the 1970 election, in which the PQ finished second in the overall vote, replacing the formerly dominant Union Nationale party as the real alternative to the Liberals.

The PQ minister, Bertrand St-Arnaud, noted that the UN was still the official opposition after the 1970 election. But only three years later, it was wiped out, and after a short-lived comeback in 1976, the UN was gone for good.

As early as 1986, Lemieux predicted that the PQ would prove to be a “generational” party and would in turn be replaced after the turn of the century by a less nationalist and more conservative party.

That might turn out to be the CAQ, in a realignment of Quebec provincial politics along left-right lines instead of sovereignist-federalist.

The implications of such a realignment could be farreaching, and not only for Legault’s party.

La Presse reported on Monday that the outcome of the April 7 election has revived the New Democratic Party’s interest in creating a Quebec provincial party to appeal to left-of-centre federalists.

And realignment would take away the Liberals’ biggest advantage, voters’ aversion to a referendum on sovereignty.

For it’s not only the PQ that has been held together by sovereignty. It’s also the Quebec Liberal Party.