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Quebec Sovereigntists Are Back. This Time They’re All Young

The new separatists were barely born the last time the province came close to leaving Canada

The first thing I notice on arriving at Club Pays, a pro-sovereignty cafe and bar that opened earlier this year in Montreal, is a neon sign: “Bienvenue dans le Mouvement!” Welcome to the Movement! The second thing I notice is that the movement appears to be running late.

Quebec is seeing an uptick in pro-sovereignty culture in young people, especially online

Prominent sovereignty advocates have deliberately taken a non-partisan approach, backing the movement itself, not political parties

Polling shows pro-independence voters scattered across four parties with differing views on other political issues

I’m here for Fête pour le OUI, the cafe’s inaugural Friday-night party for independence. But there are five people in the joint. For a moment, I panic—so much for the youth sovereignty boom—before realizing my mistake: at 9 p.m., I am only two hours late, making me early, at least by Montreal standards.

Within thirty minutes, though, a couple dozen twentysomethings are on the dance floor, bouncing along to indie-pop bops by Ariane Roy and Hubert Lenoir. The pants are barrel-legged. The tees, on all the genders, are cropped. The merch—T-shirts and onesies and totes with impeccable branding—is firmly in support of a free and independent Quebec.

At the bar, I start chatting with a twenty-five-year-old elementary-school teacher (who asks that I withhold her name for professional reasons) as she rummages through a fishbowl of pro-independence pins, hunting for one she doesn’t already have. She’s a sovereigntist; she wants Quebec to become a country. She just doesn’t see herself in the party that’s spent the last six decades trying to make that happen.

“I’m fully for a sovereign Quebec,” she says. “But I’m also for an inclusive Quebec.” At the provincial elections on October 5, she’s planning to vote for Québec solidaire, the party she says most closely reflects her values. The Parti Québécois, which spearheaded the province’s independence movement for decades, currently does not. The draw for her tonight wasn’t a political debate. It was the prospect of a room full of people her age—which just happened to be at a pro-independence cafe.

For the past year-plus, Quebec has been having a minor cultural freakout over the apparent return of sovereignty in a generation that wasn’t alive for the last referendum, in 1995. And because these are Gen Zers—the oldest of whom were born around 1997—much of it is happening online, in streams and memes and clips of teens lip-synching to a forty-six-year-old referendum speech by Réné Lévesque.

The enthusiasm is easy to see. It’s harder to measure. This burgeoning sovereigntist culture has developed at a time when overall support for an independent Quebec is hovering near its lowest point in decades. But maybe this moment, the one the polls are measuring in the fall of 2026, isn’t about producing a unified voting bloc but a cultural space, online and IRL, in which sovereignty has become thinkable again.

Naturally, it was a twenty-nine-year-old YouTuber who was the first to articulate what was happening. Mounir Kaddouri, who goes by the alias Maire de Laval online, had noticed the topic of sovereignty bubbling up on his social feeds for a few years. He tried to make sense of it in Les nouveau souverainistes, a short documentary for the youth-culture outlet Urbania, released just a few days before Quebec’s Fête nationale in 2025. Then, as now, the polls didn’t reflect it, but Kaddouri, and everyone he spoke to, knew something was happening.

Archival referendum footage was circulating as TikTok edits. Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and Charles de Gaulle were short-form fodder. Girls were posting fit checks soundtracked by a certain Quebec rock icon, captioned “hot girls like Jean Leloup.” And there were sovereignty meme accounts—so many sovereignty meme accounts—creating a highly sharable deluge of Québécois brainrot.

Kinji00, a Portugal-born, Quebec-raised rapper, now eighteen, was racking up millions of views with pro-independence tracks that cast him, with characteristic teenage modesty, the face of the movement: “La nouvelle vague souverainiste, je suis CEO” (The........

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