You don’t need a poll to know which way the wind’s blowing in Quebec’s election. You can see it in the leaders’ itineraries, their choice of issues, even their tone of voice. All point to a Parti Québécois campaign that is floundering, badly. Thursday night’s televised debate, far from turning things around, seems only to have made matters worse. For the dilemma Pauline Marois fought without success to escape on the night was the same that has ensnared her from the start.

It is this: In a campaign that has rapidly polarized on federalist versus separatist lines, the federalist vote is consolidating around the Liberals, while the separatist vote is fragmenting. As a separatist party, the PQ was already facing a more basic dilemma, namely the visceral opposition of a large majority of Quebecers to the central plank in their platform. But with that have come other problems: Unsure of a solution, without the certainty of their inevitable triumph that once bound them, the party’s divisions have widened.

They are divided in two distinct but overlapping ways: between left and right, explicit in the erosion of support to the Québec Solidaire party on its left but also visible within the party; and between the hard-liners, many nearing retirement age, who demand secession be pursued at the first opportunity, and the softpedallers who insist more time is needed to prepare the ground.

Unable, or unwilling, to regain the votes lost to its left, the party under Marois has instead reached out to its right: first, with the successful effort to tap into the province’s cultural anxieties via the “charter of values”; then, more spectacularly, with the recruitment of Pierre Karl Péladeau, in a bid to bolster the party’s credibility with economic conservatives (conservative, relative to the Quebec political spectrum, which is to say slightly less interventionist than the other interventionists).

The enlistment of Péladeau as a candidate, after his notorious battles with the province’s unions, could be anticipated to enrage even moderate left-wingers. So the economic message was downplayed: Rather, his involvement was justified in the name of achieving sovereignty. Péladeau would fill out the PQ coalition, bringing with him the voters it needed to win a majority, and with it begin the long march to independence. In the service of this higher ideal, party luminaries like Jean-François Lisée argued, distinctions between left and right faded into insignificance. There was room for both under the separatist big tent.

It wasn’t only Péladeau, with his now-famous fist-pump at his unveiling, who indulged this belief. Media commentators, not all of them separatist-leaning, greeted it as a masterstroke. The response from party activists was broadly enthusiastic. On the campaign trail, Marois, perhaps giddy over her coup, allowed herself to muse publicly about post-secession scenarios, in which Quebec and Canada would agree to do without customs or borders and share the dollar.

But there is a point where a big tent can become too broad, and collapses in on itself. Talk of sovereignty seemingly validated the warnings of the Liberal leader, Philippe Couillard, that the PQ, once elected, would force the province into another referendum: a prospect that repels even some separatists. Péladeau’s arrival, and the enthusiasm it aroused, only seemed to make this more likely. Sensing the threat, the soft nationalists and tired federalists who had been parking their votes with the Coalition Avenir Québec began to desert it for the Liberals.