Parti Québécois storms back to power as Quebec's governing coalition is wiped out

Quebec's Parti Québécois swept back into power in Monday's provincial election, winning a minority government while the governing Coalition Avenir Québec was reduced from 90 seats to zero — one of the most lopsided defeats of a sitting government in Canadian history.

The sovereigntist PQ, led by Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, won 59 of the National Assembly's 125 seats with about 28% of the popular vote, according to results published by Elections Québec, the province's independent electoral authority. The Quebec Liberal Party, led by Charles Milliard, finished second with 40 seats and roughly 24% of the vote, enough to make it the official opposition. The Conservative Party of Quebec, under Éric Duhaime, took 19 seats, and the left-leaning Québec solidaire held 9. Turnout was just under 67%.

The CAQ's collapse was the night's defining story. The party that had governed Quebec since 2018 won just over 13% of the vote but failed to win a single seat, a result of vote splitting and an electoral map that punished a party whose support had crumbled unevenly across the province. Leader Christine Fréchette, who took over after Premier François Legault resigned in January, lost her own riding.

Sovereignty back on the table

Because the PQ and Québec solidaire are both sovereigntist parties, their combined seat count gives supporters of Quebec independence a legislative majority for the first time since 1998, a milestone that immediately revived talk of a third referendum on Quebec sovereignty — the first two, in 1980 and 1995, both failed. St-Pierre Plamondon has said a referendum would not come immediately, but has not ruled one out within a PQ mandate, according to CTV News, which covered leaders' reactions to the results Tuesday morning.

As a minority government, the PQ will need support from at least one other party to pass legislation and survive confidence votes in the National Assembly, a dynamic likely to shape how aggressively St-Pierre Plamondon pursues his sovereigntist agenda in the near term. The scale of the CAQ's defeat — a governing party reduced to zero seats after holding a commanding majority just four years ago — drew comparisons to historic routs elsewhere in Canada. Legault's government had been battered over the past two years by an exodus of ministers, sustained polling declines and voter fatigue after nearly a decade in power, setting the stage for Monday's result even before Fréchette took over as leader in April.

For now, attention turns to how a PQ-led minority government forms alliances in the legislature, and to how seriously it intends to pursue the sovereignty question that just won a majority of seats, if not yet a majority of voters, for the first time in a generation. Markets and business groups in Montreal, which have historically reacted warily to sovereigntist gains, are watching closely for early signals of the new government's economic priorities as it prepares to name a cabinet in the coming weeks. The federal government in Ottawa, which has had to navigate past PQ governments before, is also expected to watch the new administration's early moves for any signal of how assertively it plans to press sovereigntist demands in federal-provincial talks.