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The night President Emmanuel Macron announced a snap election<\/a> for France\u2019s National Assembly last month, two words began to buzz around the internet and the media: Popular Front.<\/p>\n It was a reference to the left-wing alliance formed in the 1930s to resist rising fascism in Europe and at home. Now, a group of France\u2019s main left-wing parties have banded together to fight what they see as a new danger: Marine Le Pen\u2019s far-right National Rally party, which is closer to taking power than ever before.<\/p>\n That left-wing alliance called itself the New Popular Front.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the first time since the Vichy regime, the extreme right could prevail again in France,\u201d the Socialist leader Olivier Faure recently told a large crowd<\/a>, referencing the French government during World War II that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Macron decided to force the election for the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, because of an embarrassing defeat last month to Ms. Le Pen\u2019s party in a European parliamentary election.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The left-wing group of parties, which had only broken up months before over personal and policy disagreements, responded by reuniting. Despite its rushed beginnings, the New Popular Front came in second in the first round of voting<\/a>. The front was just five percentage points behind the National Rally and its allies, while Mr. Macron\u2019s centrist Renaissance party and its allies came a distant third.<\/p>\n Since then, the New Popular Front has made it harder for the far right to take over. It has built what in France is known as a \u201cRepublican front,\u201d or \u201cdam,\u201d asking their candidates from three-way races to drop out to reduce the likelihood of a National Rally victory in this Sunday\u2019s runoff. More than 130 of its candidates withdrew, along with some 80 in Mr. Macron\u2019s party, according to the French media.<\/p>\n The latest polls<\/a> predict that the strategy might work. The National Rally is still in a good position to win the most seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, but now it might fall short of the 289 needed for an absolute majority.<\/p>\n \u201cHistorically, when there is a threat from the extreme right, the left always unifies,\u201d said R\u00e9mi Lefebvre, a professor of political science at the University of Lille. \u201cThat\u2019s been the reflex since the 1930s.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But many in France fear elements of the left as well, particularly because the largest party in the alliance, France Unbowed, is known for its incendiary far-left politics. Some members are also accused of antisemitism, particularly the pugnacious and divisive Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon, a longtime leftist leader and the founder of France Unbowed.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThey want to be a dam to block the National Rally. But beyond that, what will happen?\u201d said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist who teaches at Sciences Po University in Paris. \u201cThey are asking people to take a big jump into the unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n Once powerful in the country under a strong Socialist party, the French left in recent years has been reduced to a fractious alliance<\/a> between four parties: communists, socialists, the greens and France Unbowed. The coalition was first formed in 2022 and was dominated by Mr. M\u00e9lenchon\u2019s France Unbowed.<\/p>\n A three-time presidential candidate and former Trotskyist, Mr. M\u00e9lenchon has been sidelined into a non-leadership role in the new alliance, according to other members of the group.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Mr. M\u00e9lenchon has unabashedly expressed pro-Palestinian views, refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization and vehemently denounced Israel\u2019s military operation in Gaza as \u201cgenocide.\u201d He labeled a large demonstration against antisemitism, attended by two former French presidents<\/a>, a rendezvous for \u201cthe friends of unconditional support of the massacre.\u201d<\/p>\n At a time when attacks on and threats against French Jews have spiked, Mr. M\u00e9lenchon has been repeatedly accused of fanning the growing flames of antisemitism<\/a>.<\/p>\n The alliance, already fraught with internal conflict, fell apart.<\/p>\n The weaving back together took place over four frenzied days and nights. \u201cWe didn\u2019t sleep,\u201d said Pierre Jouvet, secretary general of the Socialist party and one of the main negotiators. \u201cIt was a bit like what sailors do on long crossings, we took micro-naps of a half-hour or 40 minutes, and we drank a lot of coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n Although fear of the far right played its part in the shotgun political marriage, so did pragmatism. Given the trajectory of the far-right, if the left didn\u2019t work as a unit, it was likely to lose many of its seats, said Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Sawicki, a political science professor at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris.<\/p>\n On the fifth day, they came out with a hefty platform, thick with promises and evident compromises for a group that has fundamental disagreements on everything from involvement in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to nuclear power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nHow did the Left break apart, then come together?<\/h2>\n