Nadia Assimopoulos

Nadia Brédimas-Assimopoulos is an academic and former administrator in the Canadian province of Quebec. She was the vice-president of the Parti Québécois from 1984 to 1988 and later served as president of the conseil supérieur de la langue francaise. Before 2000, she was known as Nadia Assimpoulos.

Assimopoulos was born to an academic family in Athens, Greece with strong social democratic connections (her father's books were burned as subversive by the right-wing military dictatorship that governed the country from 1967 to 1974). She moved to Quebec in 1969, later attended the Sorbonne, and wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the linguistic integration of Montreal's Greek community.

She first ran as PQ candidate in the 1981 provincial election, at a time when the party was reaching out to non-francophone cultural communities. Associated with the social-democratic wing of the party, she later criticized PQ Premier René Lévesque for imposing back-to-work legislation on striking teachers.

Assimopoulos was elected to the powerful post of PQ vice-president in 1984, defeating Paul Bégin and succeeding Sylvain Simard. When Lévesque announced his resignation as premier in June 1985, she was also chosen as the party's interim president. In this capacity, she had a prominent organizational role in the leadership convention that chose Pierre-Marc Johnson as Levesque's successor.

The PQ was defeated in the 1985 election, and Assimopoulos was personally defeated in her second bid for public office. She continued to support Johnson's leadership after the election, including his decision to downplay Quebec sovereignty in favour of a "new national affirmation" in the existing federalist model. He was unable to build consensus support for this position, however, and resigned as party leader in 1987. His successor, Jacques Parizeau, was a hardline separatist; Assimopoulos resigned the vice-presidency in 1988 on the grounds that she could not support the party's policy direction.

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