François Legault was supposed to be the biggest nightmare for Pauline Marois and her Parti Québécois.

“Boo!” Marois is back on top in the Quebec polls, although her PQ is likely to form only a minority government, probably with the support of Legault’s new Coalition Avenir Québec, if an election were held now.

Legault’s popularity soared in the polls a year ago on the promise of a new party that would ignore the PQ goal of a new sovereignty referendum. That option left Marois and her PQ, as well as Jean Charest’s provincial Liberals, in the dust.

Legault, the self-made millionaire who founded Air Transat before entering politics in 1998 as a PQ candidate, has abandoned the PQ faith to cash in on Quebecers’ growing disenchantment with the PQ.

Legault was an attractive challenger at first. Before resigning in June 2009 from his Quebec national assembly seat, pledging loyalty to Marois, Legault had dominated the Opposition’s attacks, slamming Charest’s Liberals daily and leaving Clément Gignac, the Liberal finance minister and then economy development minister, sputtering.

Legault, after 20 months out of politics, planning his new party – a coalition of tired sovereignists and federalists disillusioned with Charest – spent most of 2011 honing his message and rallying supporters.

Legault’s new party, the CAQ, was officially formed last November. Then, in January, Legault’s party merged with the Action démocratique du Québec, the centre-right party of Mario Dumont, drawing three PQ defectors into the CAQ fold as well.

That’s when things started unravelling for Legault. François Rebello, always a Legault loyalist when the two were in the PQ, joined the CAQ, suggesting Legault’s strategy – not talking about sovereignty – was maybe the way to revive that idea.

After merging with the ADQ, which became Quebec’s third party after it formed the official Opposition in the 2007 provincial election, the CAQ seems to have inherited the ADQ’s position as the third party.

Like the ADQ, the CAQ offers simplistic solutions to complex problems, such as abolishing school boards and using the savings to pay the best teachers more.

But why would Quebec voters, enamoured with Legault just months ago, return to Marois? Polls suggest they were parking their votes: Charest remains unpopular, particularly among Quebec’s French-speaking majority, because of suspicions of corruption and cronyism; Marois may have experience as a PQ minister of finance, health, education and other portfolios, but she is not exciting.

And with the trouncing of the PQ’s Bloc Québécois allies in last May’s federal election, and Marois’ ill-calculated support for a new hockey arena in Quebec City, funded with tax dollars, she faced a caucus revolt. The betting was that Gilles Duceppe, the former Bloc leader, would assume the PQ leadership.

But Duceppe was sidelined in January by allegations he misused public money as Bloc leader. Since then, Marois’ fortunes have been rising. She has the lead, ahead of both Legault and Charest, the latter of whom appears to have shelved his plans for an early election.

© 2012 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.