Andrea Horwath boasts a winning personality.

Now she wants a winning party. So she is changing her party.

No, not changing parties — just giving the NDP a personality transplant and policy makeover. After five years as leader, she has repurposed the NDP from a progressive movement to a populist brand, appealing to the broad middle class ahead of the working class and the welfare underclass.

You can see it in her reincarnation as a tax fighter this week. She fired off a letter to Premier Kathleen Wynne warning against making people pay any new taxes or tolls to fund transit and transportation infrastructure.

And you could hear it after her byelection victory in Niagara Falls last week, where she talked up the party’s courtship of business owners: “It was amazing how many business people, how many small-business people . . . supported our campaign,” she gushed.

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The NDP’s close embrace of small business comes as it distances itself from big labour. Horwath has ignored calls from unions and anti-poverty groups to raise the minimum wage for fear of offending small business.

As MPPs return from their winter break Tuesday, Horwath will showcase more of her New Age New Democratic Party ahead of a possible spring election. With public opinion polls showing all three parties bunched closely together, the possibility cannot be ruled out of a Horwath breakthrough nearly a quarter-century after Bob Rae became Ontario’s first NDP premier.

Horwath’s political ambitions help explain the party’s remarkable shift in priorities — stressing pocketbook issues over traditional poverty concerns. The NDP’s transformation to transactional politics offers an implicit bargain at the ballot box: Give us your vote, and we’ll put more money in your pocket.

Like Walmart or The Bay, the NDP is marketing itself as a value proposition, not a pitch for voters’ values. It’s about price points, not policy points.

Horwath’s about-faces on traditional party orthodoxy turned heads during the last election. The NDP echoed the anti-tax Tories in demonizing the HST, which major unions had defended as a way to fund social programs. Horwath’s surprise campaign pledge to lower taxes on gasoline, and her latest opposition to most transit taxes, have exasperated the environmental movement (most of her Toronto-area MPPs have signed a pro-transit petition, but not Horwath). Unionists pushing for a new public pension fear she will resist any mandatory plan that imposes premiums on her new-found small business allies.

What makes Horwath run — and run away from past NDP policies? She likes to win. As NDP leader she has doubled the party’s representation in the 107-seat legislature from 10 to 21 MPPs, thanks to a successful 2011 campaign and successive byelection victories.

While the NDP’s seat count is still far behind the two main parties, it holds the balance of power in the minority legislature. Horwath has used that leverage to demand a new surtax on wealthy Ontarians and a hike in disability assistance (though she pointedly excluded general welfare rates, which the Liberals raised anyway). She also stressed popular causes such as lowering car insurance rates and curbing waste.

But her negotiating tactics became theatrical last year when she set up websites and toll-free numbers that were thinly veiled attempts to boost fundraising. As Horwath stepped up her condemnations of the Liberals as scandal-ridden and unaccountable, it became harder to prop them up.

How much longer can she be both eviscerator and enabler? Time may be running out.

The Liberals seem less likely to acquiesce to an NDP agenda. A year ago, Kathleen Wynne had just won the Liberal leadership and desperately needed time to govern as premier. Now, Wynne has caught up to Horwath’s personal popularity ratings, and some polls suggest she might still win the most seats despite a decade of Liberal political baggage.

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After the last two budget dances, the Liberals were seen as ceding the agenda to Horwath. This time, mindful of a looming election, they are loath to let her claim credit. Better to advance their own agenda on pensions and transit investments. That’s why Wynne is hinting at a progressive budget she can call her own — not an NDP clone — on the campaign trail.

Despite Horwath’s claim that she isn’t preoccupied by “election fever,” her bargaining tactics may yet provoke one in coming weeks. A spring showdown would be the culmination of her five years as NDP leader — blending her winning personality with weaker policies to produce a potentially winning party.

Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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