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The Conservative Surge Reshaping Quebec Politics

The PQ win dominated headlines, but one young nationalist argues the election was about something bigger than separation

As any pundit will tell you, the recent Quebec election marked a dramatic comeback for both the Parti Québécois and the sovereignty debate.

Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard sees it differently. The essayist and former speechwriter for Premier François Legault doesn’t dispute that the PQ believes it has a mandate to pursue independence—after all, the party won on a promise to hold another referendum. But Beauregard reads the results, not unprovokedly, as a statement on contemporary isolation and social fragmentation.

At twenty-five, Beauregard is one of the youngest voices on Quebec’s nationalist right. Across his writings and various books, he argues that what is happening in the province is a resurgence of conservative thinking among his generation. For him, the outcome of October 5 is part of a political realignment, with a divided, frustrated electorate—led by his own Gen Z cohort—hungry to recoup what it believes it has lost: stability, belonging, a shared purpose.

I reached out to Beauregard following the publication of his new book, Anti-Civilization, and asked him to walk me through his interpretation of the provincial election.

The PQ won, the Conservatives broke through, and Québec Solidaire lost ground. Do you see a common thread here? Or was it different electorates wanting different things?

The gains made by the PQ and the Quebec Conservatives represent, in a sense, the fragmentation of the coalition that François Legault had built in 2018 and 2022. What set the Coalition Avenir Québec apart was its combination of nationalism, cultural conservatism, economic pragmatism, and a promise to defend Quebec’s autonomy without reopening the sovereignty debate. Disappointment with the Legault government paved the way for the PQ and Conservatives to claim different parts of that coalition. But voters’ rejection of the CAQ did not necessarily mean a rejection of its ideological ingredients. Look at Québec Solidaire. It’s a left-wing sovereigntist party that champions social justice, environmentalism, and progressive causes. It has lost ground for a second consecutive election—a decline that suggests nationalist and conservative ideas retain their appeal and that the left remains unpopular.

Explain that a bit? It might surprise some of our readers to hear the left remains unpopular in Quebec. English Canada often treats the province as a progressive stronghold.

It depends on what you mean by progressive! Certainly, Quebec remains committed to the welfare state, as do the rest of Canada and Europe, for that matter. Nevertheless, while political debates in Quebec have been centred on identity issues for several years now, Quebec is likely the most conservative province in the country on these matters. It’s the only place where it’s widely admitted that the state has a role to protect a national culture, including the French language and a certain vision of laïcité, and where it is not taboo to argue for lower immigration. Unlike in the rest of the country, the Charter is not sacrosanct, and the CAQ government has shown that it can be popular to invoke the notwithstanding clause to defend parliamentary sovereignty against courts that would like to have the final say on Quebec’s laws.

Similarly, the rise of the Quebec Conservatives shows that a significant portion of French speakers in the province identify with a certain brand of economic liberalism: lower taxes, less state intervention, more space for the private sector in health care, for example. Éric Duhaime’s Conservatives do not defend an American-style model but rather one inspired by Nordic countries, in which the state still covers most public services but with private providers rather than a state monopoly. It would be an important change from the social-democratic model we’re used to since the ’60s, but it can be appealing to voters who feel like everything has been tried within the current model and that a bigger change is required.

What did the Quebec Conservatives offer that voters couldn’t find in other parties?

To their........

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