Though Mario Dumont had failed to defeat Jacques Parizeau in Quebec’s 2001 presidential election, he had nevertheless seemed to accomplish his secondary goal; namely, he had used the campaign to cement his status as one the country’s most prominent political figures, and had, more importantly, established the ADQ as the main opposition to the Parti Quebecois. While the Liberals officially remained the official opposition, they had exited the presidential campaign in a worse shape than they had entered it, with the party in debt and many of its former supporters drifting, primarily, to the ADQ. The ADQ, meanwhile, had come out of the election with a surge of new members, a popular leader, and the general view among the Quebec public that they were the main anti-PQ voice – a highly valuable quality given the tenuous standing of Lucien Bouchard’s PQ minority in the National Assembly. Indeed, coming off their strong success in the presidential election, the ADQ pushed to topple the government, and, despite their shaky standing, were joined by Monique Gagnon-Tremblay’s Liberals. Thus, Quebec would head to the polls yet again in the early winter of 2002.
Despite ADQ hopes, though, the election mostly played out as a repeat of the country’s presidential election from a few months earlier, in hindsight suggesting that the party would’ve been better off waiting before toppling the government. Though polls repeatedly showed that, with the economy still fairly poor, voters were frustrated towards the PQ and Bouchard, and that by and large Dumont was the most popular of the major party leaders, the ADQ, despite its recent influx of members, was still a structurally weak party. A weak party infrastructure not only resulted in uncoordinated national and local campaigns, often providing embarrassing contradictions between Dumont and local candidates, but meant that the party was unable to determine how best to take advantage of its recent influx of donations, often leaving individual candidates without the proper resources to best take on their PQ and Liberal opponents. While the presidential campaign had been relatively easy, as Dumont was always going to be the sole focus of the campaign, managing the 203 individual constituency campaigns proved to be a problem for the party. And yet despite all these problems, through most of the campaign the ADQ still found themselves in the lead. With the Liberals continuing their fall in public opinion, largely ignored by the Quebec media and unable to attract either attention or high-profile candidates, the ADQ proved to be the main benefactor, appealing to right-leaning liberals and federalists seeing them as the lesser-evil compared to the PQ. Additionally, with the PQ largely governing from the centre-left (despite Bouchard’s personal inclinations), many of their more right-leaning supporters, no longer to stick with the PQ in order to bring about separation, found themselves attracted to Dumont and the ADQ.
However, as the campaign wore on, the weakness of the ADQ machine would begin to become apparent, and avoidable mistakes from the party led to them losing ground in the final stretches. More than that, however, was Bouchard’s late-campaign shift to the right, aimed directly at cutting into Dumont’s support and winning back disillusioned PQ supporters. While the move alienated some on the PQ’s left-wing, who found themselves drifting to the new firmly left-wing Parti de la démocratie socialiste (PDS) under former FLQ member Paul Rose, Bouchard’s gambit nevertheless succeeded, as polls showed the PQ gaining back its lost ground and catching up to the ADQ. As Election Day approached, the polls showed the PQ around two-points behind the ADQ, leaving the outcome firmly up in the air. When the votes were counted, however, it would be the ADQ who would end up two-points behind the PQ, gaining 21 seats and 4 percent in the popular vote though failing to defeat Bouchard who, despite losses, would see the PQ re-elected with another minority government.
Despite this bitter defeat, though, things were still generally good for the ADQ. Dumont had emerged from the campaign with a better reputation, if anything, than he had entered it with, and the party had cemented its status as the main alternative to the PQ. Though their internal organization was still a mess, the campaign had provided an important wake-up call, and Dumont immediately set about transforming the party and bringing its infrastructure into the 21st century. On the other hand, despite his win, things had only gotten worse for Bouchard. The end results were still seen as a disappointment for the party, particularly given its relatively solid presidential victory less than a year earlier, and Bouchard’s shift to the right was particularly criticized, given its break with long-standing PQ policies and the fact that it had driven those on the left of the party to support the PDS. More than these, however, the biggest of Bouchard’s problems after the election was the fact that he had finally alienated Parizeau. While the relationship between the two had always been somewhat tense, with Parizeau bitter at Bouchard’s leadership role in the 1995 referendum and paranoid that Bouchard was angling for his job, and Bouchard resenting the fact that Parizeau had become the more powerful of the two, they had nevertheless maintained a cooperative relationship in the early years of independence, eager to maintain party unity and both worrying that the other’s support-base in the party was immense enough to force their ouster.
By late 2002, however, the dynamic had changed. Parizeau had cemented his status as the party’s leader, with two solid election victories and a decade as the face of Quebec, and Bouchard’s reputation had weakened following two disappointing election performances and years of polling showing him consistently behind Dumont in popularity. While it is speculated that Parizeau would have tried to push Bouchard into retirement eventually, his poor performance in 2002, in particular his shift to the right, had proved to be the final straw. After weeks of key Parizeau allies publicly suggesting the party would be better off if Bouchard retired, Parizeau did the same in October 2002, hammering in the final nail in Bouchard’s coffin. Bouchard would announce a week later that he would step down in early 2003 and retire to public life. Few, however, were interested in succeeding him; the PQ was still fairly weak in the National Assembly, only surviving thanks to the Liberals being terrified at what another election would do to them, and the presidential election, still 3 years away, was seen as a bigger prize for most PQ members, who thought that leading the party in the National Assembly would only weaken their prospects. One by one, rumored candidates such as Pauline Marois, Bernard Landry, André Boisclair, and Louise Harel, among others, confirmed that they would not enter the race. One person who did not, though, was Government House Leader Diane Lemieux. A centrist and noted advocate for women’s rights, Lemieux entered the race hoping to unite the left and right-wings of the party and hoping to use the position to boost her profile for a future presidential campaign. With both wings of the party viewing her as an acceptable, if not beloved, choice, and facing only token opposition, Lemieux would easily win the party’s legislative leadership and succeed Bouchard as Prime Minister in February 2003.
While briefly leading the PQ to a surge in public opinion following her election, Lemieux would ultimately be unable to fix the problems that had dogged the PQ in the past three campaigns. While she had succeeded in significantly lowering the risk of an ideological civil war within the party, as had been a concern near the end of Bouchard’s tenure, she was unable to prevent the party’s right-wing membership from further drifting over to the ADQ, particularly with an economy showing no signs of improvement and Dumont offering a compelling alternative. On the left, meanwhile, Lemieux found herself facing a more credible alternative than Rose and the PDS were in 2002, with the PDS merging with several other minor left-wing parties to form the Union des forces progressistes (UFP) in 2003 under the leadership of the far less frightening and far more electable François Cyr, who threatened to eat into PQ support and – potentially – split the vote and enable an ADQ victory. With PQ poll numbers dropping and the Liberals unable to further justify propping up the government, the country found itself going back to the polls yet again in the spring of 2004.
By this point, the ADQ had learned from their mistakes in 2002. While the party infrastructure continued to be lacking in some respects, Dumont and party president Myriam Taschereau had succeeding in modernizing the party, allowing Dumont to stick to a central message highlighting the country’s poor economic condition and to be reinforced (and, more importantly, to not be contradicted) by his party’s local candidates. The debates would prove to be the definitive moment of the campaign, with Lemieux’s vague responses on how she would improve the economy being shot down formidably by Dumont making a lasting impression on voters a week before they went to the polls. On Election Day, though again performing a bit worse than expected, the ADQ was finally able to celebrate: with 94 seats, Mario Dumont had been elected the next Prime Minister of Quebec.