de Gaulle defeated in 1965

WI Mitterrand won in '65? It appears that he swept the urban centres, while the General won the rural areas and beat him 55-45 in Round Two. You'd think de Gaulle would get a better margin...
 

Hendryk

Banned
Well, as elections go, that one wasn't close: de Gaulle won with 55% to Mitterrand's 45%, and the latter did have a very good campaign. It was already surprising that he managed to make it into the run-off. So off the top of my head I don't know what could result in his getting an even higher score; maybe if de Gaulle actually declined to campaign at all, considering it beneath him to court voters, and taking his victory for granted (after all, he won his 1962 referendum on the direct election of the president of the Republic with a solid majority).

In 1965, Mitterrand was already the single candidate for the entire left wing, from the center-left Radicals to the Communists; he hadn't formally agreed to give ministry portfolios to Communists as he would in 1981 in OTL, but he probably would have had to considering their electoral strength. However his policies wouldn't have been as ambitious as in OTL; at that point his main base was the SFIO, a mainline Socialist party from the Third and Fourth Republics with little enthusiasm for revolutionary experiments. He may have preempted the massive strikes of 1968 by implementing across-the-board wage raises and various worker-friendly initiatives (something easier to do in the climate of economic growth of the 1960s), but it's an open question whether the generational frustrations of the baby boomers wouldn't still have resulted in some turmoil by the end of the decade.

The most important butterfly would be with the EEC. In 1965 France was boycotting European institutions (the "politic of the empty chair") in order to derail the process then underway of expanding political integration. In OTL, the result was the so-called "Luxemburg Compromise", which essentially froze the process for the following two decades. Mitterrand would likely have allowed the process to continue, resulting in much earlier, and very possibly more successful, political integration of the EEC.
 
Britain's application to join the EU in 1967 is accepted but its splits the Labour government and the Wilson administration falls in 1968
 
Well, as elections go, that one wasn't close: de Gaulle won with 55% to Mitterrand's 45%, and the latter did have a very good campaign. It was already surprising that he managed to make it into the run-off. So off the top of my head I don't know what could result in his getting an even higher score; maybe if de Gaulle actually declined to campaign at all, considering it beneath him to court voters, and taking his victory for granted (after all, he won his 1962 referendum on the direct election of the president of the Republic with a solid majority).

In 1965, Mitterrand was already the single candidate for the entire left wing, from the center-left Radicals to the Communists; he hadn't formally agreed to give ministry portfolios to Communists as he would in 1981 in OTL, but he probably would have had to considering their electoral strength.

Didn't Mitterrand win a majority both of the South of France and of the colons who'd come back from Algeria?

I'm sure he wasn't just successful in working class suburbs, that he was able to harvest a protest vote against de Gaulle.
 
RB:

Actually, your maps show what Americans would consider to be a paradox compared to their own experiences: the largest French cities vote right, not left. In France, most inner cities are inhabited by bourgeois conservatives which are surrounded by suburban "Red belts." The only two of the biggest French cities found in the departments voting for Mitterand in the 2nd round were Marseille and Toulouse. This map illustrates pretty well the base of the leftists at the time, which was in small and mid-sized mining and industrial towns and the rural, anti-clerical "Red" south.

As Hendryk said, the fact that Mitterand did as well as he did he pretty astonishing for the time and is a credit to his political skills. France in the mid-60s was at the height of the "trente glorieuses," and most people were pretty happy with their lot in life.
 
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