French presidential election, 1965
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| Results of the second round: the candidate with the plurality of votes in each administrative division. Charles de Gaulle: blue; François Mitterrand: pink | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 1965 French presidential election, held on 5 December and 19 December, was the first direct presidential election in the Fifth Republic and the first since the Second Republic in 1848. It had been widely expected that incumbent president Charles de Gaulle would be re-elected, but the election was notable for the unexpectedly strong performance of his left-wing challenger François Mitterrand.
This was the second presidential election since the beginning of the Fifth Republic. Under the first draft of the 1958 constitution, the president was elected by an electoral college, in order to appease concerns about de Gaulle's allegedly authoritarian or bonapartist tendencies. There had been a historical reluctance in France to have a directly elected president because Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the winner of the 1848 presidential election) had seized power in a coup d'état before the end of his term. However, a direct presidential election had always been essential to de Gaulle's political vision and he had it adopted by referendum in 1962.
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