French Fifth Republic of the election on 9 January 1959. The new president began his office on that date, appointing Michel Debré as Prime Minister. The 1958 constitution also replaced the French Union with the French Community, which allowed fourteen member territories (these did not include Algeria) to assert their independence. 1960 became known as the "Year of Africa" because of this wave of newly independent states. Algeria became independent on 5 July 1962. The president was initially elected by an electoral college, but in 1962 de Gaulle proposed that the president be directly elected by the citizens, and held a referendum on
Republic of the Congo of the French colony of Equatorial Africa. The Republic of the Congo was established on the 28th of November 1958 but gained independence from France in 1960. In 1970, the People's Republic of the Congo was established as a Marxist–Leninist one-party state; this lasted until 1991. The sovereign state has had multi-party elections since 1992, although a democratically elected government was ousted in the 1997 Republic of the Congo Civil War, and President Denis Sassou Nguesso, who first came to power in 1979, has ruled for 33 of the past 38 years. The Republic of the Congo has become the