Close, but no cigar. In April’s French presidential elections, Jean-Luc Mélenchon again showed that France’s radical left is a force to be reckoned with — but didn’t manage to capture the presidency. After his run for president as head of the Union Populaire, in June’s parliamentary elections he rallied the Green, Socialist, and Communist parties behind his own France Insoumise vehicle in an alliance called NUPES.

Union Populaire took its name from the broad-left coalition that brought Salvador Allende to the Chilean presidency in 1970, a formative period in shaping Mélenchon’s own politics. That promising Chilean experiment would face massive domestic and external destabilization: in 1973, a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende and installed a military dictatorship that lasted seventeen years. Still today, influences from the Latin American left weigh heavily on Mélenchon’s call for a Sixth Republic and a new constitution written by citizens. But the aftershocks of the Pinochet era also weigh on the French left in other ways.

One of the candidates elected to the National Assembly for France Insoumise this June was Rodrigo Arenas, today the MP for the 10th constituency in Paris. Born in Valparaíso the year after the Pinochet coup, he is above all a son of exile following Allende’s downfall, and the convergence of his Chilean heritage and French political commitments is at the core of his politics today. Jacobin’s Nicolas Jara-Joly met with Arenas to talk about exile, diaspora, and the future of the Left in the two countries.