Five years ago, in elections held barely a month apart, the Left took a big step forward on both sides of the English Channel. First Jean-Luc Mélenchon won nearly one-fifth of the vote in the first round of the French presidential election — the best performance by a radical-left candidate since 1969. Then Jeremy Corbyn led the British Labour Party to its highest vote share in almost two decades, with the biggest increase in support for either of Britain’s major parties since 1945.

The current state of play for the movements that came together around Mélenchon and Corbyn could not be more different. The French politician surpassed his 2017 result in this year’s presidential poll, with 22 percent of the vote. He went on to lead a left-wing alliance that outperformed Emmanuel Macron’s governing party in the first round of June’s legislative elections. Mélenchon’s party, La France Insoumise, is clearly the most dynamic element in that alliance.

Corbyn, on the other hand, is no longer even a member of Labour’s parliamentary group, having been excluded by his successor, Keir Starmer. The former leader’s suspension is one aspect of Starmer’s unrelenting drive to exclude left-wingers from all positions of influence in the party, which has escalated to psychological warfare in an effort to remove one left-wing MP, Apsana Begum.