Politics in Alberta, Canada’s oil-rich conservative heartland, rarely makes news beyond its borders. The province has been governed by an orderly series of Progressive Conservative (P.C.) Party majorities since 1971; the machinations of a monarchy’s hereditary succession tend to offer more in the way of political fireworks. But on Tuesday the provincial election captured headlines around the world—not just because the longest reigning government in Canadian history, and among the most durable dynasties in any contemporary democracy, had finally fallen but because it had been toppled by the left-leaning New Democratic Party (N.D.P.). If this result wasn’t quite as preposterous as the notion of a socialist Texas—Alberta’s political culture, though it is notoriously conservative by Canadian standards, is more akin to Colorado’s than to Texas’s—it was at least strange enough that images of airborne swine soon filled social-media chatter about the results.

The causes of the P.C.’s catastrophic collapse—from seventy seats in the provincial legislature to a mere ten, with the N.D.P. surging from four to a fifty-three-seat majority—are as many and multivalent as you might imagine would come to roost in a body politic after nearly forty-four years of nearly uncontested governance. They included years of accumulated cronyism, mismanagement, lavish and self-serving spending, and no-bid contracts. The months leading up to the election only added to the mess.

The premier, Jim Prentice, a former federal cabinet minister, had been recruited to quietly clean up the problems left by the previous leader. Instead, he found himself grappling with the worst fiscal crisis since 2008 as oil prices plummeted, bleeding billions of dollars in royalty revenues from the provincial coffers. In December, nine members of the hard-right Wildrose Party, including the leader of the Official Opposition, crossed the floor to sit with the P.C.s, a move possibly without precedent in a peacetime Westminster Parliament, citing a sort of economic-wartime solidarity but angering significant swaths of the bases of both parties. Prentice then brought in a new budget with little input from the public or even his own caucus, filling it with tax hikes on individuals (which riled his right flank) and none on corporations (which riled the left). He then toured the province, selling the package with all the buoyant charm of an insurance-claims adjuster and setting up an election campaign in which he was obliged to talk of little else besides the chaos created by the low price of oil. This amounted to a regular reminder that his party had done nowhere near enough in forty-three years of rule to protect the province from volatile oil prices.

On the campaign trail, Prentice at one point appeared to blame the electorate for his party’s fiscal mistakes, telling Albertans to “look in the mirror” if they wanted an explanation for the deficit.* He also reversed himself, early on, about a plank of the budget that seemed to punish charities. During the only televised debate, Prentice appeared to patronize the capable and likeable leader of the N.D.P., Rachel Notley, when during an exchange about corporate taxes he said, “I know that math is difficult.” His justice minister, who had already been obliged to resign his cabinet post, spent the last day of the campaign in court, fighting to remove a restraining order obtained by his estranged wife.

Perhaps the strangest spectacle—and the one that, in retrospect, most clearly signalled the degree to which the P.C.s and their base had misread the electorate’s mood and lost the public trust—occurred as the campaign entered its final weekend, in a staid boardroom atop an office tower in the provincial capital of Edmonton. Five prominent local businessmen, longtime P.C. supporters and generous donors, called a press conference to reaffirm their support for the party and its business-friendly leader, and to warn of grave consequences should the N.D.P., who were leading handily in the polls, gain control. It was May 1st, International Workers’ Day, an awkwardly symbolic choice that appears not to have occurred to the men, seated in their sharp suits behind the boardroom’s microphones. They had called the press conference, one explained, to make sure that Albertans were “thinking straight” about the consequences of the upcoming vote in these grave economic times. Another C.E.O. fixed an inquisitive reporter with a troubled squint and a shake of his head to explain his opposition to the N.D.P.’s proposed two-per-cent hike in corporate tax rates. “Why is it me?” he asked, jabbing himself in his chest with a pointed thumb. “Why is it the corporation?”

The event came across almost as a satire of political arrogance and backslapping old-boy culture, and it prompted widespread mockery inside the province. Alberta in 2015 is not the Alberta of 1971, nor of 1993—the last time the party faced a serious electoral challenge from its left flank. It’s not even the Alberta of 2012, the last time the P.C.s won reëlection. The province has spent the past decade growing richer than ever before, buoyed by a mammoth oil-and-gas boom that has placed its most abundant fossil-fuel deposit—the oil sands—at the center both of Canada’s economy and of an international debate about climate change. At the same time, Alberta has grown more diverse, adding tens of thousands of immigrants from Asia and Africa each year, plus tens of thousands more from provinces in eastern Canada, where marking an “X” next to an N.D.P. candidate’s name is not regarded as an act of treason.

Still, the result was a shock even to political insiders who’d been obsessively tracking the polls. On election night, the live broadcasts called the N.D.P. majority less than an hour after the polls had closed. Every single riding in Edmonton went N.D.P. The finance minister’s small-town riding fell to a retired pulp-mill worker. A Calgary riding that overlaps substantially with that of Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is now represented in the N.D.P. caucus by a twenty-eight-year-old who formerly managed a Red Lobster.

Despite the worries of the five C.E.O.s, and despite some breathless international headlines about the implications of the N.D.P.’s victory, whether delighted (the Guardian) or aghast (the Wall Street Journal), Notley is, by all reports, not much of a revolutionary and certainly no anti-oil-sands crusader. “On many issues, it’s hard to find a lot of daylight between N.D.P. policies and those of the other two front-running parties,” Andrew Leach, an energy economist at the University of Alberta, wrote in Maclean’s about the party’s oil-and-gas plan. It will likely come as a surprise, not only to American anti-pipeline activists but even to N.D.P. boosters elsewhere in Canada, that Notley rejects Keystone XL and the equally contentious Northern Gateway pipeline, more because she believes they stand little chance of being built than because she or her party believe that the oil flowing through them is irredeemably dirty.

Alberta already ships an average of two million barrels of oil each day to refineries in places like Chicago and Texas. Thousands of members of the unions that backed Notley’s campaign collect paychecks extracting, upgrading, and shipping those barrels. And now, for the first time ever, that messy business has not a staunch corporate conservative but a personable social democrat representing it on the international stage. To the surprise of fusty P.C. stalwarts inside the province, and likely to the dismay of many environmentalists across Canada and beyond, the N.D.P. may well help Alberta sell the rest of the world on how the province makes its money.

*Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated when Prentice made his comment.