Parti Québécois is topping provincial polls, but support for independence staying flat

Almost a year and a half after it was widely seen as being near death, the Parti Québécois is topping provincial polls. And the party’s leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, is the seen as the best person to be premier.

But despite St-Pierre Plamondon’s promise of an early referendum on sovereignty, the party’s rise isn’t coming amid a surge in support for independence. Observers attribute the PQ rebound largely to the growing unpopularity of Premier François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec government.

“There’s no uptick in the desire for Quebec sovereignty,” Christian Bourque, executive vice-president at the polling firm Leger, said in a recent interview.

His company’s latest poll, published in Quebecor newspapers last Wednesday based on a survey this month of 1,032 Quebecers, put support for the PQ at 32 per cent, compared with 25 per cent of respondents saying they would vote for the CAQ. Support for independence was at 35 per cent, Bourque said, around where it has been for more than a decade.

Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said St-Pierre Plamondon was the leader who would make the best premier, well ahead of second-place Legault, the CAQ leader and premier, at 18 per cent.

The CAQ, which came to power on a nationalist platform that seeks autonomy but not independence for Quebec, had drawn supporters from the PQ who now appear to be returning to their old party, Bourque said. “Maybe it’s not all that surprising, with the growing dissatisfaction with the Legault government, that they’re going back to what they know and what was their party of choice in the past.”

The PQ’s rise is a big shift for the party, which won 14.6 per cent of the vote in the October 2022 election and just three of the 125 seats in the Quebec