Francois Legault leaves Quebec, a richer province but often at odds with the rest of Canada.

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François Legault had the opportunity to travel the world as Premier of Quebec. His state is home to dozens of international missions and trade offices in locations as far-flung as Tokyo to Barcelona to Los Angeles.

But one of his friends and former colleagues says the foreign region that left the biggest impression on him was Bavaria, Germany.

Guy Laforest, professor emeritus of political science at Université Laval, said Legault visited the land of beer mugs and lederhosen early in his time as leader of Avenir Québec and returned last year, returning inspired by the combination of material prosperity and traditional values.

“He liked the combination of economics and identity.”

It has become clear that the prime minister is fascinated by the rich, conservative bastion still shaped by Catholic tradition, folklore and increasingly anti-immigrant tendencies. Mr. Legault came to power promising to use his business background to make Quebec a smooth leader in innovation, the “Silicon Valley of the North,” but he ruled as a defensive nationalist, putting as much energy into preserving Quebec’s culture and closing the wealth gap with the rest of Canada as he did breaking through bureaucracy and building a cutting-edge economy.

As he prepares to step down, Quebec is certainly wealthy, continuing its recent trend of stronger economic growth than the Canadian average. They are also arguably more inward-looking, often at odds with other parts of the country and with ethnic minorities within the country.

After announcing his resignation as prime minister in January, he will leave behind a state that is more Bavarian and less Californian than he found it when he steps down on April 12 to elect a new leader.

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The Air Transat co-founder put his economic credentials at the center of his political rise. Trained as an accountant, it is often said of him: “He knows how to count.”

Even when he joined the sovereigntist Parti Quebecois party as a minister in 1998, he held important administrative positions in commerce, science and technology, and later education and health. The narrative that Quebec was culturally fragile and needed to be protected by law did not appeal to him.

“His nationalism was actually economic nationalism,” said Eric Bedard, who was Mr. Legault’s speechwriter at the time and is now a history professor at Université du Québec’s Telc. “Early in his career, he wasn’t happy with that defensive discourse. To him it was a loser’s discourse.”

By the early 2010s, with the PQ faltering as an opposition party, he began founding a new party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, to unite federalists and sovereignists, end the endless debate over independence, and focus on the economy and good governance. He spoke of addressing long-simmering tensions about Quebec’s identity in the face of rising immigration, while also using the province’s strong post-secondary sector as a springboard and promising a technology-driven knowledge economy. When he won a majority in 2018, he became the first entrepreneur to become Quebec premier after generations of leadership by liberal pundits, Professor Bedard said.

Legault’s vision of an economy-first prime minister was soon met with growing anxiety about the place of French and Quebec values. Whether out of expediency or sincere belief, even former colleagues like Mr. Bedard are unsure, he devoted himself to the role of popular defender of the nation.

Mr. Legault’s legacy has left many religious and linguistic minorities feeling less welcome in Quebec.

The government’s Bill 21, passed in 2019, banned civil servants in positions of authority, including police, judges, prison officers and, most controversially, teachers, from wearing visible religious symbols on duty. The law’s biggest impact was on Muslim women who wear the hijab, and despite intense public controversy following a recent Supreme Court hearing, the law was popular with Quebecers.

A similar move was made in Bill 96. Bill 96 is Legault’s 2022 effort to protect the French language by mandating the use of French by small and medium-sized businesses, not just large ones, and requiring immigrants to receive services in French after six months in the state.

Both laws were passed using preemptive use of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause, which in theory protects them from judicial review, but the Supreme Court is considering whether that is true in the case of Bill 21. Many religious and linguistic minorities, especially Muslims and Anglophones, felt targeted.

Julius Gray, a veteran Montreal constitutional lawyer, said Legault had succumbed to a “desire for uniformity” and that he was “worse than” Maurice Duplessis, the authoritarian and reactionary prime minister of the 1940s and ’50s, when it came to Quebec’s proposed constitution and personal status laws, which included a ban on most public worship.

“This is another attempt to freeze our beliefs today and say that this society cannot be changed.”

Legault pointed out similarities to the infamous incident. chef I have previously compared his party to Duplessis’ National Coalition, but most of his critics agree that the similarities are incomplete.

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Unlike his arrogant and corrupt predecessor, Mr. Legault, for all his faults, is widely seen as an honest and sympathetic man. Francine Pelletier, a progressive writer who has criticized his hard-line stance on Quebec identity, admitted she will miss his presence on the political stage.

“Why he was forgiven, and why I think history will forgive him, is that he was not arrogant,” she said.

Legault’s gruff personality has never been more appreciated than during the coronavirus pandemic. His emotionally vulnerable and candid press conferences in the midst of the crisis made him Canada’s most popular prime minister, with an approval rating of 85 per cent.

That affection was returned by leaders who were visibly moved by the sight of a society making painful sacrifices for the collective good. The lesson of the pandemic that Legault most often invokes is not the importance of science, efficient government or the heroic contributions of immigrant health workers, but the “unity” of Quebecers.

It was the more technical aspects of governing that ultimately tripped Mr. Legault and ended his honeymoon with voters. As he saw it, despite deep interactions with the public, he consistently underperformed on key files, especially in his second mandate after winning a majority in 2022.

His government was at a loss to build a controversial third link between Quebec City and its neighbors across the St. Lawrence River, failing to reconcile the project’s complex engineering with the more delicate politics.

Legault’s resignation shakes Quebec’s political landscape at a time of uncertainty for businesses

The state’s auto insurance commission’s digitization effort was a fiasco, $500 million over budget, flawed and hidden from the public by bureaucrats and perhaps even ministers.

The state lost another $250 million on a failed investment in Swedish battery maker Northvolt, which declared bankruptcy last year, embarrassing a government that had made the partnership central to its green economy strategy.

The state budget has gone from a $2.6 billion surplus during the Legault era to a projected $8.6 billion deficit.

“It’s one thing to start a business and know how to count,” Ms. Pelletier said, but it’s quite another when you’re managing a de facto nation-state.

Perhaps Mr. Legault will be remembered more for the rhetorical landscape he left behind than for his concrete accomplishments, such as infrastructure and government programs. The premier explained in dramatic terms the position of Quebec’s francophone region in the context of increasing immigration and the proliferation of English-language content online. He warned of the danger of “Louisianization,” reminiscent of the decline of French as a living language among the Cajuns of Louisiana. In a separate interview, he said it would be “suicidal” for Quebec to accept more newcomers than the province currently admits.

Although this rhetoric was criticized at the time as being too extreme, the apparent decline of the French language in Quebec and the need for nationalist measures to counter this trend became a given in provincial politics.

Before Legault took power, “the political discourse was very different,” said Etienne-Alexandre Beauregard, a conservative intellectual and former Legault staffer. “The Liberal Party doesn’t say they’re nationalists.” Now, to describe yourself that way… strict Beyond party lines.

Even some allies recognized that Mr. Legault’s nationalism could pose limitations and create a kind of insularity in his approach to leading the state. For example, LaForest, a political scientist who was involved in discussions about establishing the CAQ, said relatively little effort was expended in building relationships with Ottawa and foreign governments.

“That’s one of the things I want to accuse him of.”

Indeed, apart from his love for the wealthy conservatives of Bavaria, Mr. Legault did not travel much as prime minister, preferring the territory of the “beautiful country” for which he had painstakingly built walls.