France votes Sunday in the second round of parliamentary elections, with President Emmanuel Macron at risk of a historic setback. While he won reelection as head of state in April, the vote for the National Assembly presents a different challenge, as his Ensemble coalition struggles to form a majority in Parliament.

In the June 12 first round, it was edged out by Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale (NUPES), a left-wing coalition formed in the aftermath of April’s presidential contest. As well as edging out Ensemble in the national vote total, it made it into 406 of this Sunday’s 572 runoffs — a steep rise from the last such elections in 2017, in which divided left-wing forces qualified for just 145 of these ballots.

That contest saw a Macronist majority elected on the coattails of the new president — yet such an outcome doesn’t look so certain this time, with NUPES’s rise driving a major shift in the French political field. It can legitimately claim to be both the main opposition to Macron and the largest of the three main political camps, ahead of the neoliberal center and Marine Le Pen’s far right. This has moreover destabilized the Macron camp, with government officials now resorting to scare tactics to fend off a left-wing threat dubbed as dangerous as Le Pen.