“Aurélien, you have come back to the light,” an introductory speaker teases, “and I never doubted it at all.” On Saturday, May 21, French member of parliament Aurélien Taché launched his reelection campaign outside a café in Cergy, a suburb northwest of Paris that he has represented since 2017. Five years ago, Taché was part of the crop of young deputies elected to parliament on the coattails of centrist president Emmanuel Macron. He would jump ship from the presidential majority in May 2020, however, founding a small parliamentary formation made up primarily of ex-Macronists like himself. In 2022, the now thirty-eight-year-old deputy’s reelection poster features him alongside Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s leading left-wing hopeful, who finished a close third in April’s presidential elections.

This is one of the many political convergences the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (NUPES, in the French acronym) has made possible. An alliance of France’s progressive forces, the NUPES was formed in early May after a flurry of negotiations between Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) and the other left-wing parties, namely the Greens, the French Communist Party, and the Socialists.

Thanks to this agreement, the parties are running a united front of candidates on shared policy planks across hundreds of legislative districts in this month’s parliamentary elections. Programmatically grounded in the broad-based radicalism that Mélenchon has stood for since splitting from the Socialists in 2008, the NUPES points toward what many see as the basis for a durable culture of collaboration and unity on the Left.