For Premier Jean Charest's Liberals, the results of the Léger Marketing poll for The Gazette published yesterday are depressingly consistent.
Among the francophones who decide most Quebec elections, the government's satisfaction rating (13 per cent), Liberal support (14 per cent before redistribution of "undecided" voters) and Charest's popularity (12 per cent) were practically identical.
What this means is that if a general election had been held last week, the Liberals would have gone down to their worst defeat in more than 30 years. More than half their 65 present members of the National Assembly would have lost their seats.
So whose leadership appears to be the least secure right now?
Right, that of Pauline Marois of the Parti Québécois.
Unlike the Liberals, Péquistes have a readily available alternative to their present leader. Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe has shown interest in taking over the PQ before. Only three years ago, he even announced his candidacy for the vacant PQ leadership, before Marois scared him off.
Unlike Charest, Marois will soon face a party leadership review, at a PQ policy convention next April.
And where leadership is concerned, the party culture of the PQ is very different from that of the Liberals.
Liberals are disciplined and remain loyal to a leader, especially when they are in power, until he loses an election.
Péquistes, on the other hand, are impatient, nervous, and suspicious of any leader not named Jacques Parizeau. Since they last held power in 2003, they've already had three leaders.
And just because the PQ was in first place in the Léger-Gazette poll, 18 points ahead of the Liberals before redistribution of voters not expressing a party preference, doesn't mean its members are satisfied with their leader.
The last time the PQ held a leadership review, in 2005, it had a lead in the Leger poll of more than 20 percentage points. And still former premier Bernard Landry got the lowest confidence vote ever for the leader of a Quebec party, with only 76.2 per cent of the valid votes cast.
Since a vote of 76.2 per cent is not good enough to remain leader of a party that believes that 50 per cent plus one is good enough to break up a country, Landry immediately quit.
Marois might not be able to count on a broad, solid base of support in the party. She was not elected leader, winning by default after Duceppe withdrew his candidacy. And when she ran in the contested leadership election in 2005, she was a distant runner-up to André Boisclair with only 31 per cent of the vote.
While she has so far encountered little opposition in getting the PQ to postpone another sovereignty referendum indefinitely, her grip on the party has not always seemed firm.
In meetings leading up to the policy convention where the leadership review will be held, the PQ balked at following her even slightly to the right. And in a concession to language hawks, she accepted after some hesitation a proposal to restrict admission to English-language CEGEPs.
What her MNAs admit is that her inability to connect with voters has been blamed for the PQ's inability to capitalize on the Charest government's unpopularity. Among francophones in the Léger poll, she was seven points less popular than her party, which appears to make her a liability.
In August she demoted PQ critic Bernard Drainville, considered a possible leadership candidate, from health to Canadian intergovernmental affairs, giving him less visibility.
And last week, another Leger poll, suggesting that the party would be threatened by a new party led by former PQ minister Francois Legault, was enough to crack the fragile confidence of Marois's followers.
One of them inadvertently pointed a finger at Marois. The PQ's deputy house leader, Bertrand St-Arnaud, said the party needs to make both its new MNAs and its leader better known.
But when a party starts playing up its "team," it's because it needs to compensate for the weaknesses of its leader. And since Marois has been in active politics for nearly 30 years, voters probably think they already know her well enough.
dmacpherson faL montrealgazette.com