In late summer 2023, the Parti Socialiste MP Laurent Baumel was sitting with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, shocked.

The two men were drinking tea in a tent at Amfis, the annual festival of ideas hosted by Mélenchon’s radical-left France Insoumise (LFI) movement. In the previous year’s presidential election, Mélenchon had scored 22 percent, almost making the second round — before forging an alliance of left-wing parties called the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES) for the subsequent parliamentary elections.

The NUPES alliance pitched Mélenchon as a potential prime minister, ready to engage in a testy “cohabitation” with newly reelected president Emmanuel Macron. NUPES fell short of that goal but did manage to deny Macron a majority in parliament. This set off years of parliamentary chaos marked by undemocratic maneuvering by the president’s camp, culminating in fresh elections in summer 2024. In that contest, the new version of NUPES, this time dubbed Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), won a plurality of votes, though Macron and conservative parties denied it the chance to govern.