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Parti Québécois Falls Short of Majority in Quebec
For the first time in more than a decade, Quebec will be governed by a separatist party.
What happened: A resurgent Parti Québécois (PQ) will form a minority government in Quebec after promising to hold an independence referendum within the next four years, falling just a handful of seats short of a majority with less than 30% of the popular vote.
The PQ and its leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, focused their campaign on cultural issues rather than independence, promising to cut immigration and ban children from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols in schools.
Meanwhile, the federalist vote failed to coalesce around a single party. Both the Quebec Liberal Party and the Conservative Party of Quebec won more than 20% of the popular vote, a major breakthrough for the latter.
Why it matters: Between the PQ and Québec solidaire, a smaller left-wing separatist party, the election has produced a separatist majority in Quebec’s National Assembly. But Plamondon’s failure to secure a majority makes the path to independence more challenging.
With a minority of seats and less than a third of the popular vote, the PQ has a weak mandate, and independence is unpopular in the province: polls consistently show only around 30% of voters saying they’d vote to separate in a referendum.
What’s next: Plamondon could charge ahead with a referendum anyway, though he has promised to do so only once Donald Trump has left office, and there’s no guarantee his minority government will last that long. In the meantime, he is likely to look for fights to pick with Ottawa to improve his side’s chances should he gets the referendum he’s promised, which could complicate the federal government’s efforts to marshal a unified response to a hostile U.S. administration.
