MONTREAL–While Jean Charest enjoyed the sweet taste of historic electoral success, his fierce rival, the one-time boy wonder of Quebec politics, bitterly announced his resignation today after five failed attempts to become premier.

Charest's Liberals were re-elected with a razor-thin majority government as he became the first Quebec premier in more than half a century to capture three straight terms.

But Monday's result carried a stunning reversal of fortune for Mario Dumont – who just 20 months ago came within a whisker of becoming premier.

In a whirlwind political career that saw him become a household name in his early 20s, build the Action democratique du Quebec party from scratch and become a poster child for the province's conservatives over five elections, Dumont's career in Quebec politics appears over.

The ADQ leader said he would not lead his party into the next election following a disastrous result Monday that saw him tumble from official Opposition status to third-party annihilation with just a handful of seats.

Dumont is so closely associated with the ADQ that the party's official six-word title carries his name.

His departure from the provincial scene will stir the imagination of federal Conservatives who have long sought to bolster their weak Quebec ranks by adding him to their roster.

Dumont's frequent policy shifts in whichever direction the public-opinion winds blew – including on the sovereignty question – earned him the derisive nickname, "The Weathervane."

The man who coined the insulting moniker was smiling Monday.

After having his political obituary penned repeatedly, Charest celebrated an electoral feat not even attained by giants of Quebec politics like Rene Levesque, Lucien Bouchard and Robert Bourassa.

Charest became the first Quebec premier since the 1950s to win three consecutive mandates as his Liberals won a slim majority mandate after 20 months of minority rule.

But success risked carrying a bittersweet twist for Charest.

The margin of the coveted majority is so miniscule that it risks being wiped out by Liberal floor-crossings, health scares, or even the selection of a Liberal as Speaker in the national assembly.

Charest's victory carries a host of potential implications for Canadian politics and will be greeted as welcome news in the nation's capital.

His Liberals were hovering just above the 63-seat total needed to gain a majority in the 125-seat legislature. The Parti Quebecois won the bulk of the remaining Opposition seats as Leader Pauline Marois outperformed expectations in guiding the party back from third-party status.

The ADQ, the upstart right-wing party that found itself last year within a whisker of power, was restored to its traditional place in Quebec's electoral wasteland with barely a half-dozen seats.

The left-wing Quebec solidaire party elected its first-ever member, a Montreal microbiologist and party co-leader named Amir Khadir, in a downtown Montreal riding.

When Charest called the election Nov. 5, he invited a flood of accusations that he was cynically holding an unnecessary vote only to take advantage of his party's strong poll numbers.

He argued that Quebecers needed a stable majority government to weather the coming economic storm and hammered the theme right up to the last moment.

"The backdrop to this election is the economy, which for us is very important," Charest said as he cast his own ballot in Sherbrooke, Que.

"Choosing the next government that will have the responsibility of leading Quebec in this economic period is extremely, extremely important."

Voter turnout was extremely low – roughly 60 per cent, compared with 71 per cent in the last election – following a campaign that failed to inspire much public interest.

Charest called the vote one day after Barack Obama's U.S. election win, prompting pundits to lament the bland state of the province's politics compared with the historic vote down South.

The provincial campaign was later eclipsed by the political crisis in Ottawa and banished from the front pages.

But Charest's election gamble paid off for his party.

After nearly losing power in the March 2007 provincial election, party members were whispering about replacing Charest as recently as last fall.

But several key events propelled his improbable journey from lamentable poll numbers to some of the highest recorded levels of voter satisfaction in provincial history.

The ADQ bombed in opposition. Charest reorganized his office. And the premier bolstered his nationalist credentials by picking the occasional fight with Ottawa.

He now becomes the first premier since strongman Maurice Duplessis to win a third term and the reverberations of his win will be felt across the nation's political landscape.

Already, Charest's name comes in Parliament Hill chatter whenever the subject turns to possible future leaders of the federal Conservative party. Monday's result will do nothing to quell such talk.

But the more immediate result is that the sovereignty debate remains relegated to the back burner of the national conversation. Such stability will come as a relief to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

A Charest loss would have produced an extremely rare alignment of Canada's political stars: a separatist government in Quebec City facing a federal government headed by a non-Quebecer.

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Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney held office for all but a few months while the PQ governed in Quebec – the only exceptions being the brief reigns of Joe Clark and John Turner.

The recent federal election campaign offered vivid examples of the potential volatility Harper has been spared with Monday's result.

His Conservatives were overwhelmed by a backlash in the province over arts-funding cuts, and after failing to detect it they were so badly thumped by the Bloc Quebecois in the ensuing public-relations war that it likely cost them a majority government.

Charest was, to the dismay of Conservatives outside Quebec, among the more vocal critics of those funding cuts.

It was the latest twist in his increasingly strained relationship with Harper.

Ironically, the ups-and-downs of that relationship have been as pronounced as the topsy-turvy trend lines of Charest's own improbable career path.

A one-time wonder kid of federal politics, Charest was practically forced to abandon his job as federal Progressive Conservative leader in 1998 and make the leap to provincial politics. He lost his first provincial election several months later.

He was given up for dead by the province's pundits as he entered the 2003 campaign in third place among francophone voters. But a solid performance in that year's leaders' debate capped a surprise comeback win.

Then, halfway through a gaffe-plagued first mandate, Charest appeared destined to remain a one-term premier as he recorded some of the worst polling numbers in Canadian history – with approval ratings spiralling into the teens.

That's when Harper took office.

With a province-friendly government in Ottawa, Charest made a staggering political comeback as he gained a series of concessions for Quebec: more federal cash transfers, a special spot for at the UN's cultural forum, and a recognition of the Quebecois nation within a united Canada.

But the relationship with Harper began to sour when Charest immediately used Ottawa's so-called fiscal imbalance cash to cut taxes. Conservatives expressed their displeasure that Charest's move could prompt a taxpayer backlash elsewhere in Canada – and Charest replied that he didn't owe Ottawa an explanation for his budgetary choices.

Charest lost his majority government and almost lost power in the election last year.

A few months later, he and the prime minister nearly stopped speaking when Harper attended an event with Dumont.

The prime minister could hardly be forgiven: many members of Charest's own party were musing that his days were numbered.

One potential successor had even jokingly printed up T-shirts for his leadership campaign.

It was around that time that Charest reorganized his office.

Bolstered by a staff that included former aides to Bourassa and one-time Ontario premier David Peterson, Charest stuck to a more narrow and focused agenda and struck a more nationlist tone with Ottawa.

Meanwhile, the ADQ was flopping during its big audition. Dumont himself admitted that his party was ill-prepared for a stint as the official Opposition, one he hoped would serve as a stepping stone to victory the next time around.

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