Using the case of the 2012 student conflict in Québec, we show how social movements can temporarily transform politics. We define politics as the set of rules and individual and collective practices that regulate relations between actors regarding a community's government. We show three ways in which the 2012 student conflict transformed politics. Firstly, the six-month conflict created a new division around which politics reorganized itself. Secondly, political parties and student unions modified their daily practices, redefining their relationships and policies of alliance. Finally, the prolonged experience of mobilization transformed activists' relationship to politics by rearticulating the distinction between institutional and protest politics.