It wouldnt be a French presidential election without high drama. And Jean-Luc Mlenchon, the 65-year-old leftist candidate who has unexpectedly surged in the polls in recent weeks , is rejiggering the state of the race and complicating matters for his three rivals.

Mlenchon, once a distant fifth place in the polls, this week was polling at 20 percent , beating the scandal-ridden conservative Franois Fillon by 1 percentage point, according to an Ipsos-Sopra Sterna poll for Le Monde newspaper. Centrist Emmanuel Macron was tied in the lead with far-right leader Marine Le Pen at 22 percent.

Mlenchon, a self-proclaimed populist who likens himself to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and idolizes Venezuelas Hugo Chavez and Cubas Castro brothers, joined the Socialist Party in the 1970s and later became a senator.

He said in 2008 that he saw himself as the person who would reinvent the left in the face of a crisis of capitalism. So, he formed his own Party of the Left, but abandoned it to form another party in 2016: La France insoumise, which translates to a France that wont bow down. He drew inspiration from populist anti-liberal movements, like the Spanish Indignados.

France has always had a history of radical thinking, which for a long time originated from the Communist Party, Roger Martelli, a historian specializing in communism, told HuffPost France. When that party fizzled, Jean-Luc Mlenchon espoused that radicalism, but without ascribing to communist thinking.