The recent election of the Liberal Party, led by Jean Charest, as the governing party of Québec opens a new phase of political struggle. Charest has fashioned an aggressive neo-liberal assault on social programs and on labour unions and social organizations. In this context, the formation of a new movement-party of the left, the Union des Forces Progressives (UFP), or Union of Progressive Forces, could be especially significant. BERNARD RIOUX and GINETTE LEWIS explain.

The Union of Progressive Forces (UFP) was founded in June 2002 through the fusion of three left groups: the Movement for a Progressive Alternative, the Communist Party of Québec and the Socialist Democracy Party. This union of the political left sought to respond to a context of neo-liberal attacks launched by the Parti Québecois government before the last election. The urgency of developing resistance strategies, strengthening solidarity, and going beyond traditional means of struggle posed the necessity to overcome the fragmentation of the political left and build a unified political force which would act both electorally and in movement struggles.

The weak results obtained by the World March of Women in 2000, an important mobilization that won only minor concessions, had led activists like then-president of the Québec Women’s Federation, Françoise David to raise the need for a new political party.

The Peoples’ Summit and the following impressive demonstration in Québec City against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (in April 2001), also showed the radicalization of layers of the population against capitalist globalization and its perverse effects. The recent mobilizations this winter against the US war in Iraq, the largest in all Québec history, go in the same direction. Taken together, this radicalization posed the need to create a party bringing together different political tendencies and all progressives who would like to put an end to neo-liberal politics.

ELECTION CAMPAINGING

The program of the UFP reflects this rejection of neo-liberal policies and of the war; no to the FTAA and no to the war were themes of its election campaign. The UFP took up the main demands of the social movements on housing, fighting poverty, free and universal education and health, equality between women and men and fighting all forms of discrimination.

The UFP quickly succeeded in going beyond the three founding organizations’ limits and in presenting itself as a genuine union of the left thanks to the arrival of hundreds of activists from the movements for whom the united project is a real alternative to the neo-liberal parties.

The UFP remains a federated party in which political tendencies can co-exist. But the UFP is already more than that. It is the product of a real fusion of the founding organizations with these new activists. Its first success in the election campaign was successfully presenting itself on a mass scale as an alternative to the different neo-liberal parties in the election campaign.

This election campaign succeeded in accelerating the process of fusing the three organizations and allowed the UFP to reach a fairly broad layer of social movement militants, so that we can now describe the UFP as a new left party and not a coalition of three parties. The UFP gained ground in the unions, particularly in the Montreal metropolitan region. During the campaign, the UFP tried build an alliance with the Green Party of Québec, carrying through its efforts toward unity.

CHALLENGES TO COME

The UFP does not want to be simply an electoralist party, it wants to be a party engaged in social struggles developing on the ground.

The union movement will face important challenges in coming years. The UFP will defend the broadest unity of social movements in order to build a common front of active and militant resistance, able to counter the neo-liberal offensive.

Such a front will have to support public sector workers in their negotiations, demand concrete initiatives against poverty by the Liberal government, denounce layoffs and cutbacks in education and health, and demand reinvestment, demonstrating that the money is there if there were a tax and budget reform, while rejecting privatization and separate public services for the rich and for the poor.