With the PQ’s defeat in Marie-Victorin, the party of René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard finds itself struggling for life
When the government of François Legault stormed a Parti Québécois stronghold in an upset by-election victory Monday night, it was a devastating blow for the storied sovereigntist party.
But in the long run, it may be the loss of star PQ candidate Pierre Nantel, a former NDP MP for the area, that most marks the political history of Quebec. With this latest setback, the party of René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard finds itself struggling for life. It has been a painful fall from grace for a movement that brought Quebec sovereignty into the political mainstream in the 1970s and held two referendums on independence, one in 1980 and one in 1995. For 40 years, the party traded power back and forth with the federalist Liberals, as Quebec debated its place within Canada.can blame their subsequent freefall on the declining salience of their defining issue, Quebec independence.
In 2019, months after the PQ suffered a historically crushing defeat in the election that brought François Legault to power, its then-26-year-old representative for Marie-Victorin, Catherine Fournier, quit the party to sit as an independent. She called her former political home a “withering tree” that had “lost a lot of its relevance.”
The Parti Québécois, meanwhile, has cycled through ineffectual leaders, including the media tycoon Pierre Karl Péladeau and the sovereigntist strategist and intellectual Jean-François Lisée, neither of whom were able to stop the party’s slide. On Monday afternoon at party headquarters in Longueuil, Mr. Plamondon, at least, was in a playful mood. Imitating the reaction to a possible PQ victory, he began rapping the lyrics of the Eminem songAlthough the traditional standard-bearer of sovereignty has wilted, support for the idea itself is still relatively strong among Quebeckers. Frédéric Bastien, a historian and former PQ leadership candidate, noted that the party has read its own obituary before.
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