Quebec held an election two days ago, which saw the province’s sovereigntist Parti Québécois emerge victorious with 59 of 127 seats, five short of the 64 required for a majority. Meanwhile, the ruling CAQ collapsed from winning 90 of 125 seats (72%) in the 2022 election to zero this time around.
I wrote a post in April about vote (in)efficiency in Quebec, pointing out that the Parti Québécois won just 6 of 110 seats with 30% of the vote in the province’s 1973 election but could now plausibly win a majority with the same level of popular support.
What ended up happening Monday was that the Parti Québécois got 28% of the vote and carried 59 seats, five seats short of a majority. It was the lowest vote share ever for a winning party in the province; the previous low was the Parti Québécois’s 32% in 2012. It is also one of the lowest vote shares for a party forming government in Canadian history.
Part of the explanation is that this was an unusually fragmented election, with five viable parties splitting almost the entire vote. The second-place Liberals took just 24%, the Conservatives 21%, the CAQ 13%, and Québec solidaire 12%.
Éric Grenier from The Writ (also co-host of the excellent polling-focused podcast Les chiffres) points out that this was the first time in Canadian history, across all federal and provincial elections, that no party was able to capture at least 30% of the vote.
Incredibly, Monday night could have easily ended in a majority or a much thinner minority. Again, from Grenier:
Only 3,036 votes in six ridings separated the PQ from finishing with 65 seats […] only 3,244 votes ensured they won 59 seats instead of 54.
Efficient indeed.