With France’s parliamentary elections under two weeks away, Jean-Luc Mélenchon looks in a stronger position than ever. Where other left-populist challengers around the West have struggled to build lasting organization, or even to repeat their initial electoral scores, his France Insoumise movement has established itself as a key force in national politics. In April’s presidential contest, he scored 22 percent support, and ahead of National Assembly elections on June 12 and 19, he heads a broad-left coalition — the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES) — polling up to 30 percent support.

If such a development was unforeseeable even a few months ago, this is also not the sudden breakthrough of an unknown force. The ideological and organizational base around Mélenchon has been built over fifteen years, including through robust opposition to established social liberalism. One of its foundational acts was the battle for the “no” vote in the 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. After the French public rejected the constitution — showing the popular opposition to a project backed by both center left and center right, but which was then mostly implemented anyway — the forces gathered around Mélenchon, then on the left wing of the Socialist Party, to build a political alternative.

From the creation of the Left Party in 2009, through the Left Front campaign in 2012 and France Insoumise in 2017, these forces have worked with the aim of finally reaching the heights of the state apparatus. Yet along the way, they have faced a hard task confronting a well-established force ready to do anything to maintain its hegemony: namely, neoliberalized social democracy. Represented by the Socialist Party and the presidency of François Hollande from 2012 to 2017, it has always sought to retain the left-wing parties as junior and subordinate allies, as it has more or less successfully done with both the Communists and Greens. Especially given its residual local-level strength, this limited the possibilities for any left-wing alternative building outside this social-liberal base.