Le Pen became French President... in the 80's

Yep. I'm new on this site. I just love alternate history. (and please excuse my bad english because I'm not english)


I read a few threads which imagined Jean-Marie Le Pen (famous french far-right and nationalist) become president of France in 2002.

But he has also presented at other elections.

What if The Pen was elected in 1981 ?

Could he prevent France from signing the Maastricht Treaty (the treaty that created the European Union) ?

What about the Gulf War ?

And who could be his successor ?
 

hammo1j

Donor
I think for Le Pen to be elected in 1981 there would have to have been an economic crisis of such magnitude that the EEC would already have broken apart.

He would be a nationalist in grim times scapegoating minorities in France and banging the drum against his European neighbours, a nasty man for nasty times...
 
Yeah, Le Pen would be even more unlikely to win in 1981 than he was in 2002. The only way for it not to be totally ASB would be to create an economic and political crisis so huge that he would probably dealing with a totally different world than the one we had IOTL.

For example, if things have gotten so bad that the French have elected Le Pen, are other countries also led by extremists? If you've got an NF led UK or an NPD led FRG, or even a Communist Italy, then we've got a world order that looks significantly different from what we had IOTL, and we probably would never have a Maastricht Treaty to begin with, or an invasion of Iraq.

Without a specific PoD in situations like this, it's difficult to forecast effects.
 
1981 was too early for him even to make a respectable showing, let alone win (which he didn't come close to doing even in 2002 anyway). "While the French party system had been dominated by polarisation and competition between the clear-cut ideological alternatives of two political blocs in the 1970s, the two blocs had largely moved towards the centre by the mid-1980s. This led many voters to perceive the blocs as more or less indistinguishable, particularly after the Socialists' "austerity turn" (tournant de la rigueur) of 1983,[88] in turn inducing them to seek out to new political alternatives.[89]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rally_(France)#Electoral_breakthrough_(1982–1988) In short, it was Mitterand's victory that made the rise of the FN possible.
 
Top