Tuesday saw the opening of France’s new National Assembly, with its face radically changed after elections in June. While allies of neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron remain the biggest single group, holding 245 out of 577 seats (a loss of 105 compared to 2017), the results also left Macron struggling to cobble together a majority for his agenda.

As one sign of the changed political climate, proceedings were opened by José Gonzalez, the most elderly MP, of the far-right Rassemblement National. One of eighty-nine members for Marine Le Pen’s party — up from just eight in the previous parliament — he used his address to praise the traditions of French colonialism in Algeria.

Yet there are also dozens of new left-wing MPs thanks to the result for the Nouvelle Union Populaire écologique et sociale (NUPES), whose various parties amount to 142 MPs. This broad front — including Socialists, Communists, Greens, and others — was led into June’s elections by France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but now seems set to pursue a looser form of collaboration.