France’s Green Party, known as Europe Écologie–Les Verts (EELV), seems to be a rising force in the country’s politics. After losing all their seats in the National Assembly in 2017, in more recent contests the Greens have been slowly gaining ground — picking up support among left-of-center voters disillusioned with the neoliberal reformism of president Emmanuel Macron and skeptical of the left-wing populism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

In the May 2019 elections to the European Parliament, the Greens won 13 percent of the vote — more than any other force on the French left. In this year’s municipal elections, the party played a key role in flipping several cities run by conservative majorities, often allying itself with the Socialist Party to do so. After what some dubbed a “Green wave,” EELV mayors now run Lyon, Strasbourg, and Bordeaux, while an ex-Green runs a left-wing coalition government in Marseille, France’s second largest city.

Yet, like many of its counterparts across Europe, the French Green Party can be hard to decipher. The party has a fairly limited base of activists on the ground, and its recent victories have come amid relatively low turnout. And debate persists over EELV’s real political line — and its strategy ahead of regional elections in March 2021 and the presidential elections that kick off in April 2022, for which Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen are the early frontrunners.