The left-wing alliance won the second round of parliamentary elections, overturning both the results of the first round and opinion polls that predicted a victory for the far-right National Rally.

The result is mainly due to the concerted effort of the democratic front but also to the stakes of these elections which involved the creation of an embankment to prevent the party from Marine Le Pen to seize power. An absolute majority however remains an elusive goal with the next key question being whether this fragile alliance can endure.

The New People’s Front includes two moderate left parties, the center-left Socialist Party and the Green Party and two far-left movements, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Insubordinate France and the Communist Party.

The alliance’s policy positions include lowering the retirement age, which President Emmanuel Macron raised last year, and greatly expanding government spending on social welfare, environmental protection and health care. But especially, the alliance was forged by the left-wing parties’ common goal of thwarting the far-right. The name New Popular Front is a reference to a left-wing alliance formed in the 1930s to resist fascism.

After early predictions on Sunday, Mélenchon, the alliance’s best-known politician, presented himself as a spokesman and called on Macron to give the bloc the mandate to form a government. However, Mélenchon is considered too radical even by some of the more moderate members of the New Popular Front, and Macron’s centrists are unlikely to support such a coalition.

Last month, Macron claimed that the left-wing alliance includes parties that promote anti-Semitism or have violated French democratic values ​​in other ways. “Things are simple,” Macron said. “We have unnatural alliances on both ends of the political spectrum that agree on almost nothing.”

Forming a government supported by a majority of MPs may be impossible unless moderate members of the New Popular Front abandon their alliance and join forces with Macron’s coalition.

Tensions within the alliance appeared to have risen in recent days. On Thursday, François Raffin, one of the left’s most charismatic figures, left Melancholy’s party.

During the formation of the alliance, the left parties had agreed to nominate one candidate per constituency. But to the dismay of the moderate left, which includes the Socialist Party that has shaped French politics, Mélenchon’s party won a particularly high number of seats.