Imagine if Brenda from Bristol was Brenda from Bordeaux. Having voted in two rounds of the French presidential election, she would now face two more rounds of parliamentary elections on 12 and 19 June. “Encore ça déjà” (Not another one!)

President Macron scored a great triumph in the second round of the presidential election on Sunday. He is the first French president to be re-elected for two decades. He outscored even his most optimistic final opinion polls, beating Marine Le Pen 58.54 per cent to 41.46 per cent. But that was the easy part. He now needs to win a new parliamentary majority in elections to the National Assembly next month.

There are excellent reasons to believe that he will fail. An instant opinion poll on election day on Sunday found that 68 per cent of French voters would like opposition parties to hold the majority in the new assembly: in other words to force Macron to surrender de facto power to a prime minister of Left or Right.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) believes that he can lead a coalition of Left and Green parties to a parliamentary majority on 19 June. Several figures on the Right, including the defeated Le Pen and her rival Eric Zemmour, believe they can become prime minister and reduce Macron to little more than a ceremonial role.

This would be extraordinary, and borders on the unbelievable. The French electorate can be perverse but it has never in the 57 years of the present system denied a parliamentary majority to a newly elected president. By convention, the Fifth Republic is presidential. By law and by constitution, it is parliamentary. Without a friendly majority in the Assembly, the president is forced to appoint an unfriendly prime minister, as François Mitterrand discovered when he lost midterm elections in 1986 and 1993 and as Jacques Chirac found when he lost an election that he did not need to call in 1997.

There are several reasons to believe that Macron will avoid their fate (known as “cohabitation”). First, the French electorate seems unconsciously to feel the need to supply a newly elected President with a majority in the assembly. 

Admittedly, the political landscape has been transformed in the last five years. Instead of the traditional “families” of centre-left and centre-right, French politics has been split into three almost equal blocs of “divided Left”, “Macronian pro-European Centre” and “nationalist Right”. None of these blocs (with about 32 per cent of the vote each) seems strong enough to dominate the new assembly. The Left says that it is ready to unite under Mélenchon but the ideological divisions and personal jealousies remain powerful. The Right are poisonously split between the rump of the old Gaullist movement, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and the new movement of the nationalist Right led by Zemmour and Le Pen’s ambitious niece Marion Maréchal. 

Macron has an alliance of four centrist parties or factions. They have their own quarrels but they are more united than either Right or Left. More than two candidates can fight the second round in parliamentary elections. The run-off, on the first past the post system, can split three, four or even five ways. The most united camp scoops the closely-fought seats. That looks likely to be Macron’s centre.

And yet there are also a couple of reasons he may fail to win a majority. As head of state, he cannot fight the campaign himself. He has to leave the leading role to a prime minister, not yet selected. None of the names doing the rounds have any experience as political campaigners.

Then there is the fact that the French Left, furious at having had to vote Macron to block Le Pen (again), are unusually united and keen to punish him in June. They, not Le Pen or the rest of the Right, will be the real threat to Macron. Undoubtedly, the whole affair will be a  messy and close-run thing.