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| This article is part of a series on the politics and government of Gabon |
| Foreign relations |
General elections were held in Gabon on 19 March 1967 to elect a President and the National Assembly. Incumbent Léon M'ba of the Gabonese Democratic Bloc was the only candidate in the presidential election, and was elected unopposed. [1] In the National Assembly election the Gabonese Democratic Bloc was the only party to contest the election, and won all 47 seats. Voter turnout was 99.4%. [2]
Gabon, officially the Gabonese Republic, is a country on the west coast of Central Africa. Located on the equator, Gabon is bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north, the Republic of the Congo on the east and south, and the Gulf of Guinea to the west. It has an area of nearly 270,000 square kilometres (100,000 sq mi) and its population is estimated at 2 million people. Its capital and largest city is Libreville.
The National Assembly is the lower house of the Parliament of Gabon. It has 120 members, 111 members elected for a five-year term in single-seat constituencies and 9 members appointed by the President.
Gabriel Léon M'ba was the first Prime Minister (1959–1961) and President (1961–1967) of Gabon. A member of the Fang ethnic group, M'ba was born into a relatively privileged village family. After studying at a seminary, he held a number of small jobs before entering the colonial administration as a customs agent. His political activism in favor of black people worried the French administration, and as a punishment for his activities, he was issued a prison sentence after committing a minor crime that normally would have resulted in a small fine. In 1924, the administration gave M'ba a second chance and selected him to head the canton in Estuaire Province. After being accused of complicity in the murder of a woman near Libreville, he was sentenced in 1931 to three years in prison and 10 years in exile. While in exile in Oubangui-Chari, he published works documenting the tribal customary law of the Fang people. He was employed by local administrators, and received praise from his superiors for his work. He remained a persona non grata to Gabon until the French colonial administration finally allowed M'ba to return his native country in 1946.
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On 27 November 1967, just days after he took his presidential oath at the Gabonese embassy, M'ba died from cancer, and was succeeded by Ali Bernard Bongo. He declared the country a one-party state the following year.
El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba was a Gabonese dictator under French control who was President of Gabon for 42 years, from 1967 until his death in 2009. Omar Bongo was promoted to key positions as a young official under Gabon's first President Léon M'ba in the 1960s, before being elected Vice-President in his own right in 1966. In 1967, he succeeded M'ba to become the second Gabon President, upon the latter's death.
A one-party state, single-party state, one-party system, or single-party system is a type of state in which one political party has the right to form the government, usually based on the existing constitution. All other parties are either outlawed or allowed to take only a limited and controlled participation in elections. Sometimes the term de facto one-party state is used to describe a dominant-party system that, unlike the one-party state, allows democratic multiparty elections, but the existing practices or balance of political power effectively prevent the opposition from winning the elections.
