For the third time in the last month, on Tuesday hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of cities around France to voice their opposition to President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age. Ahead of the protests, MPs from left-wing alliance NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union) stood side by side in front of the National Assembly to display their joint opposition to the reform, ahead of the parliamentary debates.

But behind this facade of unity there are growing fractures within the French left. Grappling with an increasingly uncertain fate, the NUPES has been paralyzed by tensions within the parties that form the coalition. What was, upon its creation, hailed by La France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon as a “new page of history” could prove short-lived.

Things seemed rather different last May, when NUPES was launched ahead of the parliamentary elections. The left-wing pact emerged from an agreement between La France Insoumise, the Greens, Socialists, and Communists to join forces around a common and ambitious agenda. Crucially, the agreement provided for a single left-wing candidate in each constituency. The multiple rival candidacies in the 2017 elections had rendered the French left powerless against the tide of President Macron’s neoliberal En Marche! party. But this time around, indeed largely thanks to the NUPES’s joint candidacies, the Left revived its presence in the National Assembly, expanding its share of the seats from one-tenth to one-quarter. With 142 deputies — fifty-three more than the second main opposition group, Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National — the NUPES asserted itself as the main challenger to Macron, whose supporters have now lost their majority in Parliament.