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MONTREAL — As Quebec enters the 2018 election year, the biggest story could be not who wins, but who loses.

The Parti Québécois is in deep trouble heading toward the Oct. 1 vote, shunned by younger voters and a distant third in opinion polls. The Coalition Avenir Québec, formed with a mission to focus on the economy instead of the Constitution, is the runaway choice of francophone voters. Fifty years after the PQ’s creation, analysts are saying this could be the year the federalist-separatist stranglehold on Quebec politics is broken.

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The PQ “is becoming a little bit the party of a generation and a party of the (outlying) regions,” said Christian Bourque, executive vice president of the polling firm Léger Marketing. He sees no clear escape for the PQ from its steady decline in public support.

“The only way out of that,” he said, “is for them to come up with a new way of defining why sovereignty could be appealing for younger Quebecers who do not see themselves in the old politics, which is Quebec versus Ottawa, us versus them.”