The French Socialist Party congress in Marseille in late January was marked by a show of unity between two camps who had just over a week before seemed irreconcilably opposed. January 19 had seen a divisive election for the leadership, with incumbent first secretary Olivier Faure edging out Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, the Socialist mayor of Rouen, by just under four hundred votes. Almost immediately, there were accusations of fraud and a promise to contest the election. But a recount released on January 29 confirmed Faure’s victory — this time, five hundred ahead.

Yet the proceedings did little to resolve contradictions in the once-mighty ranks of French Socialism, after nearly a decade of decline. A unifying “orientation text” was adopted, which does little but paper over the fundamental division in its ranks. On one side of the rift is the faction led by Faure, which wants to maintain the federation of the Left known as the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (NUPES) and which supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon for prime minister in last year’s parliamentary elections. Against this stands an old-guard faction, which is ideologically and constitutionally opposed to the radicalism of Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (LFI), and by extension NUPES. The settlement at the Marseille congress looked like little more than a tactical retreat by this anti-NUPES faction, which knows that, for now, it holds a minority position in the party.

The Socialists weren’t always the junior partner on the Left. As recently as 2012, the party won the presidency and an unprecedented 280 seats in the National Assembly. They governed as part of a near impregnable 331-seat majority — a year before, they’d won a majority in the Senate. In 2008, they won a large popular vote plurality in the municipal elections and governed a clear majority of France’s cities with populations over a hundred thousand people.