A friend asked me what I have to say about the results of the ‘historic’ Quebec election. It seems that the French press have slightly misread the tea-leaves on this one if those relying on such coverage see the victory as having some meaningful contribution to global independence movements.

After all, support for sovereignty among Quebecers is at historic lows after the separation question was narrowly defeated in a 1994 referendum. The newest generation of Francophone Quebecers is certainly still seized by the belief that Quebec’s distinct culture requires a high level of autonomy within the Canadian federation, but the focus is on determining the society’s own future, not leaving Canada.

Marois’ victory is historic in one sense – if she succeeds in forming a government with the minority of seats she won, she will become Quebec’s first “première ministre” (emphasis on the “being a lady”). It is also historic in another way, but probably not in the way you would imagine. Because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, Marois’ Parti-Quebecois (PQ) was able to win a plurality of seats despite receiving a lower percentage of the vote than previous elections where another party formed a majority government. Looking province-wide rather than seat-by-seat, it’s their second-lowest level of support in any election since 1973.

As for what it might mean, even if they had received a strong mandate: the PQ itself nominally supports independence, but their game is a long one, indeed: their goal is only to have a referendum on independence “at some point” and almost certainly not before the next election. They realize that there is insufficient support in the province to win a vote – so their main goal is to increase that support by getting into fights with the federal government. Another party, that promised an immediate referendum, received negligible support. Why then, was Marois able to form government? First, Quebec has been seized by a sizeable political corruption scandal, which goes at least as far back as the last PQ government, but which Jean Charest’s Liberals did nothing about during their ten years in power – save for being strongarmed into holding a public inquiry; unfortunately for them, voters assumed that the dirty laundry belonged to the people currently living in the house. Second, the province was seized by protests causing significant disruption which, though sparked by a student strike against a proposed tuition fee increases, eventually expanded to include concerns about civil liberties and a challenge to neoliberalism more generally. Opponents and supporters of the protests both felt that Charest’s government had failed them, either for being too heavy-handed, or not being heavy-handed enough. A new party, the CAQ, essentially billing itself as the law and order option bled much of Charest’s support away, despite being nominally sovereigntist. Despite the softness of her position, Marois was also able to attract supporters of the student strike to vote against Charest with her mixed message of solidarity with the students, bolstered by one student leader standing as a candidate for the party (successfully).

The second explanation of the victory is, unfortunately, also what makes the election historic. And not in a good way. It can easily be claimed that the PQ campaign marked the greatest amount of fear-mongering against linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities of any election in Quebec – at least in the last fifty years. One key plank of the PQ platform was the exclusion from any public employment – firefighters, clerks, teachers, doctors, police, administrators, secretaries, policy advisors; anything – of anyone wearing a visible religious symbol. We are talking about firing a significant number of public employees, essentially because of what religion they belong to. Another was disqualification from any elected office of anyone who does not speak French – presumably, despite the province’s large English minority population, a job which could be ably done by the electorate. The PQ then reversed and said this would only apply to new immigrants…sigh. The subtext here was a concern about those people (read: immigrants) who could not speak ‘proper’ French, i.e. who were not pure-laine. All of this, of course, was backed up by spurious claims about threats to the French language and Quebecois identity in the province.

These things might have scared away some voters. The PQ has traditionally been seen as a progressive alternative, and I know many anglophones who voted for another, left wing sovereigntist party, Quebec Solidaire, while holding their nose on the sovereignty issue. The PQ was obviously happy to be rid of anyone of this stripe who might have voted for them in the past. It was clear that the PQ’s strategy, and a successful one, was that any loss was significantly made up by the support of a base rallied by the worst forms of paranoid, parochial, pseudo-racialist nationalism, ensuring that they did not vote for another sovereigntist party, or simply choose to stay home. It seems to have worked; the only thing which prevents it from significantly tarnishing the great affection I have for my adopted province is that it worked, but only barely. The victory they were able to scrape out of deploying these tactics was a narrow one.