Chadian Democratic Union

The Chadian Democratic Union (in French Union Démocratique Tchadienne or UDT) is the second African political party ever created in Chad. It's ancestor can be traced in the Mutuelle Amicale Tchadienne (MAT), created in 1945 under the impulse of Joseph Brahim Seid by Mahamat Yakouma, Mustapha Batran, Abdoulaye Touré, Souleymane Naye, Adoum Tchéré and Ahmed Kotoko. This became the UDT, founded in November 1947 mainly by African traditional leaders, as Gontchomé Sahoulba; it represented French commercial interests and a bloc of traditional leaders composed primarily of Muslim and Ouaddaïan nobility. It was linked with a conservative political party representing the Europeans in Chad, the Gaullist Rally of the French People, and also sided with the other political parties founded in Chad by European expatriates. Members of this party at first won easily local elections, but from the 1953 is started being superseded by an offshoot, the Chadian Social Action, which fished mainly in the same electoral pool. As a result the UDT started dissolving itself, also under attack from the emergence of the Chadian Progressive Party, more radical and nationalistic. In the 1957 elections, where the PPT reported a landslide gaining 32 seats out of 65, the UDT had only a marginal role as an ally of the PPT. And shortly after the party disappeared in the "parliamentary guerrilla" that inflamed the Territorial Assembly before Independence from France in 1960.