Among the wave of memes and posters produced by supporters of France’s leftist parliamentary alliance last summer, one of the more memorable ones featured a column of hearts with the message, On s’engueulera plus tard, or “We’ll argue later.” It was meant as a light-hearted plea for left-wing politicians to stop bickering and to focus on their common foes—but today, it reads as a grim statement of fact.

Seven months after unexpectedly winning a plurality of votes in snap legislative elections and denying the far-right a chance at governing the country for the first time since the Second World War, the New Popular Front (NFP) coalition—made up of La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialist Party, the Greens, and the Communist Party—is on the brink of collapse. As Sandrine Rousseau, a Green MP in the National Assembly from Paris, told The Nation in an interview, “the NFP isn’t dead, but it’s on life support.”

Tensions have brewed for months. With President Emmanuel Macron refusing to name a left-wing prime minister—opting first for conservative Michel Barnier, then center-right François Bayrou—the coalition has struggled to land on a common opposition strategy. Clashing messages and messy public disagreements between member parties have become the norm. Disappointing election results have followed suit: in January, the Macronists won a special legislative election to replace an NFP-backed MP who resigned over allegations of sexual assault; earlier this month, the right-wing Republicans won a special mayoral election in a working-class Paris suburb governed by the Communists as recently as 2020.

The most serious flare-up, however, has emerged over the country’s budget. This month, Bayrou rammed the government’s budget legislation through Parliament using a special constitutional procedure (Article 49.3) that can only be overridden by a motion of no-confidence.

This is the same move that Barnier made late last year—with one key difference. Whereas the New Popular Front united to successfully oust Barnier with a no-confidence motion, the alliance has fractured over Bayrou, with the more centrist Socialists refusing to back a no-confidence push. Leaders of LFI, the largest party in the NFP, have accused the Socialists of betraying the alliance and selling out the French people. The Socialists meanwhile, have sought to portray La France Insoumise as irresponsible bomb-throwers, with former President François Hollande, now an elected MP, declaring the party “incapable of leading the Left to power.”

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Can France’s left alliance be repaired? Or is doomed to self-implode at a crucial juncture, with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally leading polls ahead of the next legislative and presidential elections? The answers will depend in large part on the choices made by the coalition’s two biggest forces, each of which has fueled tensions for very different reasons.

Remi Lefebvre, a political science professor at the University of Lille and Socialist Party expert, stresses that the Socialist commitment to a broad alliance involving LFI has been fragile from the onset, ever since the creation of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES), the left coalition formed ahead of the 2022 legislative elections. “There’s an opposition to La France Insoumise within the Socialist Party that’s very strong,” he says. “A share of the party is moderate on economic questions and thinks LFI’s platform is too left-wing. But they also disagree on questions related to secularism, like whether or not Islamophobia is a problem. LFI and its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself have evolved on these questions too.”

When Socialist Party chief Olivier Faure agreed to take part in the NUPES in 2022, it sent swaths of the party’s old guard up in arms, with figures like François Hollande and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo openly expressing their opposition. “And it’s not just a minority, we’re talking about half the party,” stresses Lefebvre, who points to the party’s last congress in 2023, when Socialist activists re-elected Faure to his post as first secretary with just 51 percent of the vote. While Faure still leads the party, his job involves a delicate balancing act—further complicated by the fact that Hollande aims to rally moderate factions and unseat Faure at the next party congress in June. “Olivier Faure’s line is ‘look, I’m left-wing but I’ve taken my distance from LFI,’” says Lefebvre. “That’s the political space he operates in.”

When the Socialists doubled the size of their National Assembly delegation in last year’s snap elections, it seemed to offer validation of Faure’s strategy of providing cautious support for broad left-wing unity. On the face of it, here was someone who had carefully steered the party back into relevance. But Faure’s rivals on the right of the party had a different interpretation: that French voters yearn for an even more powerful Socialist Party, like in the glory days of Hollande and Lionel Jospin—and that Faure isn’t up to the task.

Officially, Olivier Faure has defended his party’s move to break with the rest of the Left on the motions of no-confidence by warning of the instability caused by a protracted period without a budget. In an interview with The Nation, Socialist MP Arthur Delaporte, who like the vast majority of his colleagues abstained from the budget votes, also pointed to his party’s ability to obtain some concessions from the right. Aimed at reducing France’s deficit, Bayrou’s budget included billions in spending cuts, though the government backed off an initial proposal to cut 4,000 public school teaching jobs, pared back some of its cuts to green energy subsidies, and boosted funding for public hospitals. “If the budget was voted down, we’d have to go through another negotiation cycle that would last three months and it could be even worse than the current budget.”

But Remi Lefebvre also says the Socialist Party’s strategy needs to be understood in the context of internal party politics. “It sounds contradictory but it’s precisely to weaken the right-wing of the Socialist Party and to weaken François Hollande that the party didn’t vote the motion of no-confidence,” he says. “If they’d voted the motion of no-confidence, François Hollande would have a good chance at winning the next congress and the left-wing line within the PS would disappear.”

Whatever the motivations may be—whether or not Faure is engaged in a game of five-dimensional chess—the rest of the NFP disagrees with the Socialists’ decision.

“The Socialist Party has never totally broken with neoliberalism and so it’s compatible to a degree with Macronism. The problem is they accepted the agenda of the NFP, but are they completely convinced of it? I’m not so sure,” says Hendrik Davi, an MP from Marseille who sits in the Green delegation and who voted for the motion of no-confidence. “It’s hard to know if this is just about winning the next congress or if it’s a more lasting realignment of the Socialist Party. I don’t have the answer to that. But I think they’re deluding themselves if they think voters are to be found in the center.”

Sandrine Rousseau, the Green MP from Paris tells me legislators should’ve backed the motion of no-confidence for other reasons. “The subject isn’t the budget,” she says. “There’s a problem with the values of this government. This government wants to reconsider fundamental constitutional principles like birthright citizenship, equality and free movement. For all these reasons, we needed to vote a motion of no-confidence from the beginning.”

And yet, for all their disagreements with the Socialists, Davi and Rousseau firmly reject the uncompromising analysis of La France Insoumise, which claims the Socialists have chosen to remove themselves from the coalition. In a recent statement, LFI said the Socialists had definitively “changed alliances” and “broken” with the NFP. But as Sandrine Rousseau argues, one party cannot simply expel another from the coalition. “No single party is the owner of the New Popular Front,” she says.

Indeed, to truly understand the tensions roiling the New Popular Front, one must also consider the dynamics within La France Insoumise. According to several current and former LFI MPs, as well as former parliamentary aides from LFI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party bears a heavy share of responsibility for the NFP’s woes. Under the 73-year-old’s leadership, the party has sought to reassert its dominant position on the Left, even at the risk of isolating coalition partners and destroying the fragile alliance.

Few know Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s political career better than Raquel Garrido, one of the founding figures of La France Insoumise in 2016 and an ex-member of Mélenchon’s tight-knit inner circle. A dissident Socialist like Mélenchon in the 1990s and early 2000s, she helped create the Left Party with him in 2008, supporting his first presidential bid in 2012 and serving as spokesperson on his second campaign in 2017. In 2022, she was elected as an MP with La France Insoumise in an eastern suburb of Paris, but lost her seat in 2024 after public disagreements with Mélenchon over the party’s strategy and internal organization resulted in LFI running a candidate against her and four others, including Hendrik Davi in Marseille. (The three who successfully staved off the challenges from their former party now all sit in the Green delegation.)

As Garrido explained to The Nation, LFI’s move to embrace a broad left-wing alliance anchored in its platform in 2022 marked a major strategic shift—one as important as the Socialist Party’s own turn. “When Mélenchon lost the presidential elections for the third time in 2022, and he decided we needed to get more MPs, more elected officials, and unite everyone on the basis of our program, this was the product of 13 years of hard work and it marked a turning point,” she explains. “It was a 180 degree turn. Our enemies from before became our friends.”

It even appeared for a brief stretch that Mélenchon would ease away from frontline politics. Addressing his supporters on the night of the first-round of the 2022 presidential election, which saw him place a close third to Marine Le Pen, he sounded like a man on the verge of retirement: “We came pretty close,” he said at the end of his speech before concluding with two words of advice to the young activists in the room. “Do better.” When Mélenchon played an instrumental role in uniting the French Left behind LFI’s platform just a few months later, it seemed like a fitting final act. After years in the trenches, he had won a stunning ideological victory. His one-time renegade movement had supplanted the Socialists and united the Left.

But shortly after the creation of that alliance in 2022, Mélenchon’s view of the situation evolved. While his loyal supporters and allies-turned-critics haven’t shied away from butting heads, they do agree on this much: the three-time candidate started to believe he could mount a fourth presidential campaign.

Garrido says Mélenchon’s personal presidential ambitions are the key to understanding LFI’s uneasiness with France’s left coalition over the last three years. “It’s my intimate conviction that Mélenchon regretted the creation of the NUPES,” Garrido told me. “Because he understood the enthusiasm around this new entity, which was becoming a legitimate space to plan a common strategy for the next presidential elections. From that point onward, his single ambition was to break the NUPES.”

Eric Coquerel, an influential LFI MP from the Paris suburbs who heads the all-important finance committee in the National Assembly continues to support Mélenchon, but he does acknowledge LFI’s leader underwent a change of heart in 2022. “When he says, ‘Do better,’ it can mean ‘Okay, we lost, we need to rebuild.’ But if after that, we almost win the legislative elections, you might tell yourself, ‘Actually, we’re maybe still in the process that began in 2012 or in 2017, which is to say, we have a candidate who almost made it to the second round of the presidential election. We’re maybe still in this process. And if that’s the case, is there a better candidate than him?”

By the fall of 2022, Mélenchon had no official position in LFI and wasn’t a member of the National Assembly. But as Garrido argues, he reasserted his dominance of the party through his defense of Adrien Quatennens, a prominent LFI MP accused of and eventually found guilty of domestic violence. After Quatennens confirmed allegations in the press that he had slapped his ex-wife during a disagreement, Mélenchon stunned supporters by firing off a tweet expressing his “trust” and “affection” for the MP from Lille.

While Quatennens’ ex-wife filed charges and the MP stepped aside from the National Assembly, Mélenchon lamented the “lynching” of the young MP and publicly called for his return, sparking tense debates within LFI. In December 2022, a court found Quatennens guilty of domestic violence and handed down a four-month suspended prison sentence. In April 2023, LFI MPs voted 45-15 to officially welcome him back into the group.

“Mélenchon used the Quatennens affair to engage in internal discipline, to do a first purge,” says Garrido. “He took something that was very hard to accept and he sorted out which ones accepted it and which ones didn’t. He needed a solid core of people who were very, very determined to carry out an order, even when it was hard to apply.”

In December 2022, LFI unveiled a long-awaited overhaul of its organizational structure. It announced a new “coordinating committee” that propelled Mélenchon loyalists into party leadership, sidelining Garrido and other prominent historic figures of the movement like Clémentine Autain, François Ruffin and Danielle Simonnet. To this day, LFI has no dues-paying members or open leadership elections.

Garrido says that Mélenchon’s stranglehold on LFI and his obsession with the presidential election explains many of the head-scratching decisions from the party to distinguish itself from the rest of the Left, starting with its unilateral strategy of parliamentary obstructionism during the grueling pension reform battle in 2023. While a united labor movement and other left-wing parties favored a standard up-or-down vote on the unpopular proposal to hike France’s retirement age from 62 to 64, LFI deployed more than 13,000 amendments in the National Assembly to draw out the debate, all but inviting the government to use the controversial Article 49.3 to approve the bill.

“The unions wanted to us to have a normal vote because the movement was strong and they had actually managed to sway a few right-wing MPs,” recalls Garrido. “Mélenchon didn’t want us to have a normal vote. He said ‘those who vote are traitors, they want us to lose to Macron.’ He was constantly looking for points of fracture, tension, and division with the rest of the left.”

In the end, it may have not mattered. After triggering Article 49.3, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s government survived the ensuing motion of no-confidence by nine votes. As LFI supporters argued, nothing guarantees that holding a vote on the individual measure raising the retirement age would’ve actually changed the ultimate outcome. But the defeat left many left-wing politicians with a bitter taste in their mouths. Millions had taken to the streets in a popular movement led by organized labor—and yet left-wing parties didn’t seem to benefit much politically.

After October 7, intra-left tensions grew further. While the three other left-wing parties condemned “terrorist attacks” from Hamas, La France Insoumise issued a statement describing an “offensive from Palestinian forces” with “thoughts for all the victims.” In subsequent interviews, Mélenchon and LFI MPs repeatedly refused to describe Hamas as a “terrorist” organization. And as the party poured energy into support for Palestine solidarity protests and ramped up criticism of Israel, rivals from across the political spectrum accused it of fomenting antisemitism.

“This accusation of antisemitism is a classic tool used against the left,” bemoaned one former LFI parliamentary aide, regretting that prominent Socialists piled on to the attacks from Macronists and the far-right National Rally. “As soon as you touch Israeli politics, this accusation comes up.”

Raquel Garrido argues that both right-wing Socialists and LFI hardliners used the horrors in Gaza to settle scores against one another. “It was important to find points of disagreements that were irreversible. If you say, ‘Mélenchon is antisemitic,’ well ok, you can’t ally with someone who’s antisemitic. For Mélenchon, it’s the same thing, if you say, Jérome Guedj [a Socialist MP and former protégé of Mélenchon’s who suggested LFI acted as “useful idiots” for Hamas, but who has also sharply criticized the government of Benjamin Netanyahu] is a supporter of genocide,’ ok well you can’t ally with Guedj. There were words and expressions used to create divides that couldn’t be bridged. It’s a shame, because in France, we could’ve had a big peace movement. The majority of people are against killing kids and innocent civilians. We could’ve had done something really powerful with the left alliance because all the parties agree on the essential things: the end of settlements in the West Bank, a two-state solution, and a cease-fire.”

With LFI facing blowback for its staunch criticism of Israel, critics also dug up a number of troubling comments from Mélenchon over the years: his 2013 accusation that economy minister Pierre Moscovici, whose family is Jewish, “no longer thinks in French but thinks in the language of international finance”; his 2020 comments that Jesus was crucified by “his fellow compatriots”; a 2021 interview in which he described far-right polemicist and presidential candidate Eric Zemmour as reproducing a “cultural script” and “traditions” linked to Judaism. Mélenchon vehemently rejected the accusations of antisemitism, arguing in a June 2024 blog post that antisemitism was “residual” in France.

“I don’t think La France Insoumise is antisemitic,” says MP Henrik Davi, who was elected with LFI from 2022 to 2024 before the party unsuccessfully ran another candidate against him over his disagreements with Mélenchon’s strategy. “But sometimes there are moments of clumsiness and poor word choices. When it comes to discrimination against Muslims, we have no problem saying it’s a form of systemic racism and that because it’s systemic we all have moments where we might say certain things, use certain expressions, or reproduce certain imaginaries without even noticing it. Anti-Semitism is a form of systemic racism, too.”

Another former LFI parliamentary aide says the party’s culture of avoiding public apologies compounded the problem. Instead of acknowledging that antisemitism exists across French society—including in left-wing spaces—Mélenchon chose to ignore the issue. And with a hostile media and political establishment often conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, LFI’s defensive reflexes only intensified. “It’s in the DNA of La France Insoumise,” the aide said. “There’s a complete rejection of self-criticism.”

In any case, by June 2024, the original left-wing alliance was in ruins. Following elections to European Parliament in which France’s four left-wing parties each ran separate tickets, LFI was gearing up to more formally distance itself from the rest of the coalition. When President Macron dissolved the National Assembly on June 9, he was apparently confident the left was incapable of uniting.

But of course, events proved him wrong. Amid calls for a broad “popular front,” grassroots support for unity, as well as intense lobbying from LFI dissidents and other left-wing politicians committed to dialogue, leaders of the four parties returned to the negotiating table. Much like the moderate Socialists skeptical of a broad left alliance, Mélenchon was left with little choice but to accept the arrangement.

As political scientist Remi Lefebvre stresses, the costs of going it alone were simply too much to bear for everyone involved. “If the left isn’t united, it means it loses a huge chunk of its MPs, and it loses public subsidies, which are determined by the number of MPs elected,” he says. “Without an alliance, the left would be dead.”

After the unexpectedly strong showing in the 2024 elections, left-wing parties did manage to rally around a candidate for prime minister they could all support: 37-year-old civil servant Lucie Castets. But the tensions have only re-emerged since. François Hollande has gone on the offensive, galvanizing the anti-LFI contingent in his party and drawing renewed media attention over his potential “comeback.” (Olivier Faure has shot back, arguing the former president isn’t fit to lead.) La France Insoumise, for its part, has continued to emphasize its differences from the rest of the NFP, both in tone and strategy.

Last fall, LFI unilaterally launched a public campaign calling for Macron’s resignation and the holding of new presidential elections (with Mélenchon as unofficial candidate in waiting). In December 2024, it blasted a decision from the Greens, Socialists and Communists to meet with Macron over the naming of a new prime minister. In the meantime, LFI politicians regularly refer to the importance of a “program of rupture,” a bold set of ideas and proposals they say distinguishes their party from the rest of the left.

The former LFI aide said the insistence on “rupture” is baffling, given how compatible the platform is with other left-wing parties—at least for the time being. They said differences over tone and strategy obscure the more fundamental programmatic agreements. “Their platform is further to the right than the Socialist Party in the early 1980s, but they use the language of a small Trotskyist organization,” the aide said.

Danièle Obono, an LFI MP from northeastern Paris, disagrees with that analysis. In an interview with The Nation, she stressed that tone matters—but she also argued her party’s differences with others go deeper. “I’m not sure we should have a nice calm tone and worry about not offending the bourgeois when we’re facing such a violent offensive from the reactionaries and the fascists,” she said. “We do know how to do messaging, but it’s only a problem for some when there’s a political difference.”

That said, a couple of recent LFI pronouncements raised eyebrows from across the rest of the left.

Earlier this month, LFI officials were criticized for the framing of the party’s defeat in the special mayoral election for the Paris suburb of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. While the campaign was marred by intra-left bickering and LFI’s candidate won just 39 percent of the vote, party figures sounded oddly triumphant, with one MP even celebrating an “exceptional score.”

A few days later, after the Socialists refused to back LFI’s motions of no-confidence in the National Assembly, LFI’s parliamentary group shared a graphic on social media comparing Socialist Olivier Faure to a cackling Marine Le Pen with the message: “The new alliances.” Amid backlash, LFI removed the post.

“This image was poorly understood and poorly interpreted,” LFI MP Paul Vannier told me. But when asked if he “regretted” the publication of the image, the influential legislator in charge of the party’s election strategy responded in typically Mélenchonian fashion. “No, we don’t regret it. Given the bad interpretation that it resulted in, we preferred not to use it.”

According to Davi and Garrido, missteps like these are the product of the party’s lack of internal democracy and the absence of a culture of debate. As Davi puts it, “LFI’s decisions aren’t sufficiently mulled over by a collective where someone might say, ‘Wait a second, maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

For his part, MP Eric Coquerel acknowledges the party could be more democratic. “I’ve been critical in the past about this topic. I haven’t said much publicly, because I didn’t want to pile on to all the criticism of LFI, though I’ve said it internally. Is it still the case today? I think we’re starting to find ways of mediation and intermediary bodies that allow us to breathe more easily,” he told The Nation. “I’m not saying things are perfect but we’re getting closer to let’s say a form of representation and development that is more collective and more democratic.”

No matter one’s perspective on the internal tensions, the polls at the moment are unambiguously grim for all of the French left.

With President Macron authorized to once again dissolve the National Assembly as early as June or July 2025, a February IFOP poll showed a divided left is all but destined to lose seats: if LFI ran its own slate of candidates, it would win 8 percent of the vote compared to 19 percent for the rest of the left and 35 percent for the National Rally. Given the mathematical realities today, many remain skeptical the New Popular Front is truly in its death throes. Like the political scientist Remi Lefebvre, they believe the threat of losing dozens of seats is too great to ignore.

But if Macron doesn’t dissolve the National Assembly and remains in office until the end of his term in 2027, presidential elections would come first. Here, the polls are even bleaker. A December 2024 poll showed Mélenchon earning 12 percent of the vote, well ahead of the other left-wing candidates but well behind hypothetical Macronist candidates and Marine Le Pen. (Another February poll from IPSOS showed Mélenchon is the most hated politician in France, even more than far-right polemicist Eric Zemmour.)

Still, LFI stalwarts are sticking by their man. Eric Coquerel points out Mélenchon overcame unfavorable polling to nearly qualify for the second round in 2022. “I’m not worried,” says Paul Vannier. “We don’t base our struggle on polls of popularity or unpopularity that allow right-wing and far-right voters to express their hatred of our political ideas.”

Mélenchon and his allies have publicly outlined what they consider their path to victory: first, by mobilizing their base (according to Mélenchon, young people and residents of what the French call quartiers populaires, working-class neighborhoods in urban areas inhabited by large shares of immigrants and their descendants) and then hoping for the best in the run-off round against the far-right. As Mélenchon told the Italian daily La Repubblica last summer, “I don’t care if 78% of French people don’t want me. I still have 22%. With that, I’m in the second round. And there, we’ll see who they hate more: me or Le Pen.”

Others are more skeptical. They say the LFI leader’s strong showing in 2022 was boosted in the final days of the campaign because he was seen as the only left-wing candidate capable of qualifying for the run-off round. They call instead for uniting behind a single candidate. “If we don’t have a common candidate on the left, we’re not going to be in the second round, it’s as simple as that,” says Sandrine Rousseau, the Green MP. “We actually need to win the election too, it’s not just about getting into the second round.”

“We’re undergoing a form of Trumpization,” Rousseau continues. “The far-right has France as its next target. All our little disputes are nothing compared to that. At a certain point, I don’t care if the Socialists voted this, or the Communists voted that, or LFI voted this, I really don’t care. Right now, we need to win. We owe it to people.”

For Hendrik Davi, left-wing party leaders would do well to listen to their own voters when it comes to the presidential election. “At the base, there’s a real demand for unity, shared by citizens, voters, and activists,” he says. “If the political leadership isn’t capable of offering unity at some point or another, well the idea is going to evaporate.”Unfortunately for such proponents of left unity, they’ve yet to land on a hypothetical presidential candidate—or even agree on what the process for doing so would look like. And with Mélenchon declaring there will be a La France Insoumise candidate in 2027 and Hollande flirting with another bid of his own, the clock is ticking. “With the far-right on the rise, the question we’re facing is are we going to be the stupidest left in the world or not?” Rousseau says. “Or are we actually going to be one the most intelligent lefts in the world?”