new road, built at the bottom of the cliffs almost at sea-level, took 7 years to complete and was opened to traffic in 1963. It was later enlarged as a 4-lane expressway between 1973 and 1976. In 1957, a large modern hospital was opened in Saint-Denis, the , one of the results of the transformation of the colony into an overseas department in 1946. The 1959 French municipal elections were once again marked by political violence in Réunion. In Saint-Denis, on election day (March 15, 1959), a young Communist militant was shot and killed by a Gaullist militant, and another Communist militant was severally injured by the same gunman. Paul Vergès, who was the Communist candidate to become mayor of Saint-Denis, was beaten by Gendarmerie forces during clashes in the streets and left unconscious on the pavement. The Gaullist candidate, , was declared winner of the election, but the Communists accused the authorities of electoral fraud. This pushed Vergès to secede from the French Communist Party two months later and found the Communist Party of Réunion, which then campaigned for more autonomy from France. Yet in July 1959, Charles de Gaulle, president of France, received a warm welcome on his arrival to Saint-Denis, the first visit by a French head of state since the foundation of the city. In 1961, the first modern hotel and the first supermarket opened in Saint-Denis. The city's (and more generally the island's) infrastructure, however, was still largely underdeveloped compared to metropolitan France, and many people lived in great poverty. In the countryside, people often resided in huts with bare earth floor, and the housing situation in the city was getting worse every year with the now rapidly growing population. De Gaulle's prime minister Michel Debré, who had accompanied De Gaulle during his 1959 visit and witnessed the poverty and underdevelopment then prevalent in Réunion, feared that it would push the islanders towards asking independence from France, as had happened in the rest of Africa. After stepping down as prime minister in 1962 following the independence of French Algeria (to which he had been opposed), he was determined to prevent the same fate in Réunion, and decided to stand in the 1st constituency of Réunion by-election to the National Assembly in the beginning of 1963 (after the results of the 1962 French legislative election in that constituency, which the mayor of Saint-Denis Gabriel Macé had