After two-and-a-half years without a permanent leader, the Quebec Liberal Party finally elected one last summer. Now, they’re leaderless again. A week before Christmas, Pablo Rodriguez resigned amid allegations of vote buying, plunging a once-dominant political machine back into crisis. The Liberals are polling around 20 percent and scrambling to rebuild trust with a base that’s fed up with the disarray and fleeing. Meanwhile, support for the governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) has collapsed; according to recent polls, François Legault is Canada’s least popular premier.

In this vacuum, the Parti Québécois (PQ) has surged ahead, dominating the polls for the last two years, even as it pledges a sovereignty referendum that most Quebecers say they don’t want. All this with a provincial election scheduled for October. “I say this without hyperbole,” says poll analyst Philippe J. Fournier, “but this election has no precedent in Quebec history, at least in the last fifty years.”

At stake is more than one party’s fortunes. The Liberals have been Quebec’s federalist anchor for generations, but their unravelling comes precisely as the PQ is positioned to win a majority and trigger that referendum. If the Liberals can’t rebuild by October, voters will be left with a tricky choice: a vote on sovereignty, a governing party they’ve soured on, or alternatives that remain electorally marginal. When the referendum comes, it’s not clear who will be left to make the case for Canada.

It hasn’t been a stellar millennium for the Quebec Liberal Party, as Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, says. After governing for much of the 2000s, the Liberals entered the final years of former premier Jean Charest’s tenure deeply weakened. Despite winning three successive mandates, Charest’s approval had sunk to 27 percent by 2012.

That collapse accelerated amid two destabilizing shocks: the Maple Spring—months of mass student strikes sparked by Liberal-proposed tuition hikes—and the Charbonneau commission, which exposed widespread corruption and illegal party financing across Quebec politics, staining the Liberals in particular. The party returned to power in 2014, under Philippe Couillard, but quickly imposed deep austerity, slashing health and education budgets, laying off hundreds of health care workers, and igniting new rounds of protest.

“Those were not shining years for them,” says Béland. By 2018, after nearly fifteen years in power with only a brief interruption, voters were ready for change, clearing the way for François Legault and the conservative CAQ to win a majority, bringing about a realignment the Liberals have yet to recover from.

Things went from bad to worse in the next election. In 2022, led by Dominique Anglade—an engineer, deputy premier under Couillard, and the first Black woman to lead a major provincial party in Canada—the Liberals suffered their worst result since the party was founded in 1897, earning less than 15 percent of the popular vote. Anglade resigned that fall. Veteran member of the National Assembly Marc Tanguay took over as interim leader, but the party didn’t launch a leadership race for over two years, likely hoping the delay would attract a........

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