Congolese Party of Labour
콩고 노동당
The ruling party of the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). Founded in 1969 by Marien Ngouabi as a pro-Soviet Marxist–Leninist vanguard party, it was the sole party of the People's Republic of the Congo. It abandoned Marxism–Leninism after 1991, returned to power after a period in opposition from 1992 to 1997, and adopted social democracy as its principal ideology in 2006.
In depth
Ngouabi founded the party on 29 December 1969. It was designed as a Soviet-style socialist one-party state, but the English-language source describes it as essentially a military regime with a strong ethno-regional character, dominated by officers from the sparsely populated north. In the 1970s the party was torn by internal struggles. Leftists with a pro-Chinese position such as Ange Diawara attempted a coup against Ngouabi in February 1972 and failed, while the right wing was represented by Joachim Yhombi-Opango.
After Ngouabi was assassinated in unclear circumstances in March 1977, Yhombi-Opango succeeded him, but he was ousted by his opponents in the party in a coup in February 1979, and Denis Sassou Nguesso took power. Sassou Nguesso sought good relations with both the West and the Eastern Bloc, and at the 1984 congress he sidelined the hard-line pro-Soviet faction of François-Xavier Katali. In the single-party elections of 1973, 1979, 1984 and 1989 the party won every seat in the National Assembly. It had about 70,000 members in 1990.
After serious unrest multi-party politics was introduced in 1990, and in 1991 the National Conference repudiated PCT rule and set up a non-PCT transitional government. In the 1992 election the party won only 18 of 125 seats and went into opposition for the first time, remaining there throughout the presidency of Pascal Lissouba. Sassou Nguesso returned to power by winning the civil war of June–October 1997.
Sassou Nguesso won the 2002 presidential election with 89.4% of the vote, and the Fifth Extraordinary Congress in December 2006 adopted social democracy as the party's new principal ideology. For the 2007 parliamentary election the English-language source gives 46 seats and the French-language source 47. In 2012 the party won a majority for the first time in the multi-party era, with 89 of 139 seats, and in 2022 it won 112 of 151 seats. It had about 250,000 members in 2005.