Québec City, Québec - Separatists won provincial elections in Québec on Monday, promising to hold a vote on secession from Canada and testing Prime Minister Mark Carney's message of national unity.
While the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) fell short of an overall majority government in Canada's French-speaking province, it will offer little solace for the federalist bloc, who are faced with a governing party that is firmly against Ottawa.
The PQ win upends Canada's political landscape as the country confronts a trade war and annexation threats leveled from President Donald Trump's administration in the US.
It also comes just two weeks before Canada's oil-producing province of Alberta, an economic powerhouse, holds a separate vote on whether it wants to begin the process of leaving Canada.
The results make PQ leader Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon, a 49-year-old lawyer known by his initials as PSPP, Québec's next premier.
At a jubilant victory party in Montreal, his supporters chanted a famous separatist slogan declaring that "Québec is a country."
The partial results indicated that the separatists won only about 30% of the vote, but vote-splitting among the federalist parties tipped the result in the PQ's favor.
"We have the right in a democracy to pose the question [to leave Canada]," 26-year-old oil worker Felix Marineau told AFP. "Being against an independence referendum is being against democracy."
Carney congratulated PSPP, saying that "building a stronger Quebec is core to our mission of building a stronger Canada."
The prime minister is popular in Quebec, and the separatist win was not seen as a repudiation of his stance toward Trump, whose trade war and annexation threats have infuriated Canadians.
Instead, the PQ's rise after more than a decade in opposition has been tied to frustration over affordability and an enduring desire to protect the French language in an increasingly anglophone country.