It's importing 'a' from '.', which I guess in this context means from the current namespace (__main__), and a is 7.  You'll note that 'b' did get repointed, but it got repointed to what 'a' points to, instead of to 5.  If it really wasn't replacing the local, you'd get '7 5', not '7 7'.

So, this is weird but expected, I think.  You'll have to actually produce the example that doesn't involve __main__ if you want us to look in to that, but most likely it will be some similar phenomenon.

I'm not 100% sure this is the *desired* behavior of 'from . import', though, so I'm leaving this open for the import experts to look at.

Also, in 3.8 at least I get a warning from the import system, which is a clue something weird is going on :)