The erosion of electoral support for the Legault government

François Legault’s [7] CAQ is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. According to QC125 [8], the CAQ continues to decline in voting intentions, falling from around 22–24% in 2024 to 17% in June 2025. In the 2018 elections, then in 2022, Legault presented himself as the leader of a pragmatic “nationalist” project, capable of ensuring Quebec’s prosperity. But behind this discourse lay a neoliberal policy: tax gifts to large corporations leading to industrial failures (Northvolt [9], Lion électrique [10]), cuts in education, greater opening of the health system to the private sector, management scandals like at SAAQclic [11], and attacks on union rights. The consequences of these policies are clear: deterioration of living conditions for the majority, housing crisis, crumbling of public services. His inability to take the climate crisis seriously, his desire for endless growth without considering the planet’s limits have also fuelled these setbacks. In the background, the chronic impotence of CAQ nationalism to wrest additional powers from Ottawa [12] finishes discrediting it. The CAQ now appears for what it is: a party of the Quebec bourgeoisie, tied to economic elites and incapable of responding to popular needs.

The PQ’s recovery and its contradictions

This erosion opens a political space that the Parti Québécois (PQ) occupies with renewed vigour. Long marginalised, it now captures discontent towards the CAQ and remobilises an independence base lacking a project since 1995 [13]. It has held first place for several months with voting intentions above 30%, reflecting a significant realignment of Quebec’s political field. Thus, in several regions and among young voters, the PQ manages to reactivate support for the sovereigntist option, marking a generational inflection in public opinion.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s [14] discourse seduces through its coherence: refusal of the oath to the king [15], promise of a quick referendum, denunciation of federalist impotence. But behind this clear line hides an identity nationalism that links immigration, housing crisis and danger to the French language’s future, adopting the scapegoat logic already used by the CAQ. The PQ regains strength because on one hand, it embodies a rupture with the PLQ’s prostration before Ottawa and on the other hand, it stigmatises the Legault government’s inability to obtain significant gains from Ottawa.

The Quebec Liberal Party and the difficult path of reconstruction

The Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) is not simply in crisis: it is in a state of collapse. The results of the 3 October 2022 elections, a meager 14.17% of votes and 21 seats confined to Montreal are not a simple electoral defeat, but the logical outcome of a historical role: that of a party serving the Canadian bourgeoisie and Quebec federalist elites.

After the Charest years [16], Philippe Couillard [17] prolonged the austerity cure: massive cuts in social spending, privatisation of entire health sectors under Barrette [18], creeping commodification of education, attacks on school support professionals, weakening of the early childhood network. Each Liberal reform was a direct attack on the working classes, benefiting insurers, private clinics and multinationals. The PLQ did not “manage” the State: it put it at the service of the rich, transforming social rights into business opportunities for capital.

Within the framework of rising sovereignty/federalism polarisation, the PLQ attempts to rebuild. Its bet is clear: become the great federalist party again by profiting from both CAQ erosion and fear of a referendum. But its nationalist deficit among francophone voters, inherited from decades of neoliberalism and submission to Ottawa, remains gaping. This project moreover runs up against the profound rejection it still inspires among francophone working classes.

The role of the Conservative Party of Quebec or the desire to normalise far-right policies

In this landscape, the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ) installs itself as the political vehicle of the far right. Under Éric Duhaime’s leadership, it combines economic ultraliberalism, health and education privatisation, public service commodification and reactionary demagoguery inspired by Trumpism with assumed climate scepticism, hydrocarbon revival, xenophobia and attacks on democratic institutions.

In the 2022 general elections, this strategy allowed the party to collect more than 12% of votes nationally, an unprecedented result for a previously marginal formation. In certain regions, the PCQ reaches significant scores: more than 15% in several Mauricie [19] constituencies and more than 35% in certain counties of Capitale-Nationale [20] and Chaudière-Appalaches [21].

This electoral breakthrough reflects the implantation of an authoritarian and antisocial political current, carried by a fraction of the petite bourgeoisie and popular layers seduced by its anti-elite and anti-State discourse. The danger is real: even without government prospects, the PCQ pulls all Quebec debate rightward and contributes to legitimising the most reactionary positions.

At the foundations of Québec solidaire’s current stagnation

After a decade of electoral progression, and the qualitative leap it experienced in 2018 by electing 10 MPs, Québec solidaire had disappointing results in 2022. These results were disappointing not because of the results (15.4% of votes and 11 MPs), but because the party’s discourse had dangled the possibility of becoming the official opposition and positioning itself to become a future government. The party is now going through a phase of stagnation, even decline, explained by a set of strategic and organisational choices.

Under Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois’s [22] impetus, QS sought to present itself as credible opposition and a future governing party. This orientation translated into pragmatic recentring, sidelining of rupture proposals, such as natural resource nationalisation and explicit abandonment of capitalism critique. If this strategy aimed to broaden the electorate, it diluted the party’s political specificity and weakened its image as a contestatory force.

This turn was accompanied by organisational centralisation. The parliamentary wing and communication teams took precedence over militant life and links with social movements. Base mobilisation reduced to support for electoral campaigns, without real valorisation of self-organisation. The statute congress crystallised this evolution by reinforcing leadership power, provoking a feeling of internal democracy loss.

This parliamentary recentring also weakened the party’s capacity to embody firm opposition on social and antiracist issues. The leadership’s prudent attitude in defending Haroun Bouazzi [23], after his denunciations of the xenophobic climate at the National Assembly [24], illustrates the tension between seeking institutional respectability and radical social engagement that had constituted QS’s DNA.

The electoral consequences of this impasse are clear. Nadeau-Dubois’s resignation appeared as the culmination of a strategy that failed to broaden the electoral base while demobilising part of the militants. The score collapse in the Arthabaska by-election [25] illustrates this double failure: QS lost both its militant momentum and the confidence of an electorate seeking a rupture alternative, while the Parti Québécois profited from the void left.

Thus, Québec solidaire’s crisis does not reduce to electoral vagaries, but stems from strategic and structural choices. By adapting to parliamentary logics and betting on an electoralist strategy centred on institutional credibility, the party compromised its social anchoring, its internal democracy and its critical specificity. It now finds itself at a crossroads: either it deepens its integration into parliamentarism at the risk of aligning with other parties, or it reconnects with militant dynamics and rupture projects that had nourished its initial rise.

For an ecosocialist and ecofeminist turn by Québec solidaire

After a lightning rise that made it the expression of a new militant and popular generation’s rupture hopes, Québec solidaire is declining in voting intentions and in the perception that generation had of it as a rupture force. If Québec solidaire wants to recover the possibility of genuine revival, it must operate a major turn – strategic, programmatic and organisational – that finally breaks with adaptation logics to the dominant system.

Québec solidaire needs a strategy that surpasses the simple ambition to “govern reasonably” to anchor itself in real struggles: those of workers, ecological, feminist, antiracist movements, youth in revolt and neighbourhoods in resistance. It involves building popular power, feeding the combativeness, unity and democracy of antisystemic social movements, instead of channelling them towards passive waiting for electoral deadlines.

This rupture line must rally a popular majority around a clear project: that of building an independent, ecosocialist and ecofeminist Quebec. This implies:

– the end of pillaging our natural resources and energy by multinationals;
– democratic planning of production and investments, turned towards energy and material degrowth and towards collective well-living;
– a sovereign Constituent Assembly to lay the foundations of a social and democratic republic;
– eradication of patriarchal domination and construction of an ecofeminist society;
– reinforced and self-managed public services;
– defence of migrant rights and struggle against systemic racism, notably towards Indigenous peoples and racialised communities;
– an audacious linguistic policy that makes French the common language without stigmatising immigrant persons;
– rejection of identity secularism used as a weapon against minorities;
– radical, anti-imperialist and antimilitarist internationalism.

But for these perspectives not to remain simple proclamations, Québec solidaire must transform its political practice. This means: prioritising intervention in social struggles; building a combative ecosocialist left within unions, ecological, feminist and youth mobilisations; elaborating an offensive and mobilising rupture programme; initiating militant campaigns capable of rekindling hope.

A decisive choice is imposed. Either QS pursues its drift towards electoral “realism” and it will marginalise itself, like so many other institutional left parties before it. Or it fully assumes its project of rallying a majority ready to struggle for an independent, just, ecosocialist, feminist and internationalist Quebec.

About the Author

Bernard Rioux has been a socialist militant since the early 1970s and was involved in the left political unification process. He participated in founding the Socialist Democracy Party [26] and the Progressive Forces Union [27]. A Québec solidaire militant, he participates in the Socialist Left collective where he was long responsible for its website, lagauche.com (now lagauche.ca). He is a founding member of Presse-toi à gauche [28].