On October 14, 2025, President Andry Rajoelina was toppled following a massive popular mobilization and subsequent military intervention. Facing “Gen Z” protests that began in late September, Rajoelina was removed by a vote in the National Assembly, while the military unit CAPSAT declared it was “taking power” in front of the presidential palace in Antananarivo.
Colonel Michael Randrianirina, the head of CAPSAT, announced the dissolution of the Senate and the High Constitutional Court, while maintaining the National Assembly’s operations. He declared the formation of a military committee to oversee the transitional presidency pending the establishment of a civilian government. Significantly, CAPSAT backed Rajoelina during his rise to power in 2009. Its alignment this time with the protesters signals deep fractures within the Malagasy bourgeois state and establishment.
According to multiple sources, Andry Rajoelina fled Madagascar on October 12 aboard a French aircraft, in an operation coordinated with Paris and approved by President Emmanuel Macron. The company whose jet transported Rajoelina out of Madagascar, TOA Aviation, was the same that helped Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn extralegally flee prosecution in Japan. This exfiltration reveals France’s active role in safeguarding its strategic interests in a former colony where its economic and military presence remains strong. Rajoelina is reportedly now in living in a wealthy district of Dubai.
Macron emphasized the need to preserve “constitutional order,” without ever condemning the repression or the role of the Malagasy army. The complicit silence of the former colonial power underscores the imperialist nature of its intervention, aimed solely at protecting the interests of international capital.
This military overthrow follows several weeks of mass popular protests, initiated by a Gen Z collective that crystallized the anger of Malagasy youth around demands like an end to water and electricity cuts, fighting corruption, improved living conditions, and the president’s resignation. The movement quickly expanded, gaining support from union confederations, civil servants and demonstrators of all ages.
The regime’s response was brutal: live ammunition, tear gas, mass arrests. According to the UN, at least 22 people have been killed and over a hundred injured since the protests began.
The government’s militarization, marked by the appointment of General Zafisambo as Prime Minister on October 6, only deepened the crisis. Confronted with a population where over 75 percent live below the poverty line on less than €0.80 per day, the regime failed to address social demands, opting instead for repression.
The protest quickly moved beyond youth alone. The Malagasy Trade Union Solidarity collective, comprising around fifty unions, called for a general strike starting October 1, demanding Rajoelina’s resignation and a wage increase after a freeze since 2022. The teachers’ union SEMPAMA denounced the lack of educational resources and joined the mobilization.
Yet their role reflects the limits of trade unionism—in Madagascar and globally. While verbally supporting the social explosion, they also call on the Church and local elites for “dialogue,” aiming to prevent any revolutionary movement. Their orientation remains one of institutional compromise, which fails to address the structural roots of poverty—capitalism—and the need for independent revolutionary organization of the working class.
Several opposition parties, including Tiako i Madagasikara (TIM) and Malagasy Miara-Miainga (MMM), have tried to position themselves as alternatives to Rajoelina’s regime. But their role remains essentially opportunistic: channeling popular anger into the narrow framework of institutional negotiations while safeguarding the foundations of capitalism.
While the mass mobilization advances social demands that can only be met through a struggle for workers’ power and socialism, the army’s intervention aims to defend bourgeois order and preserve the interests of imperialism and the national bourgeoisie.
Bitter experience shows that military interventions in popular uprisings do not aim to fulfill the aspirations of the masses. In Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, the supposed neutrality or support of the army served to defuse mobilization, restore bourgeois order, and ensure the continuity of the capitalist system under a new facade.
The betrayal of workers’ struggles by unions and pseudo-left parties enabled the bourgeoisie to regain political control. In Egypt, this capitulation paved the way for the return of military dictatorship under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who now rules the country with intensified repression against workers, youth, and all forms of social opposition.
CAPSAT’s intervention—already involved in multiple transitions between anti-democratic regimes in Madagascar—does not represent a fundamentally different class nature. The Malagasy military regime, backed by imperialist powers, especially France, will use every tool at its disposal—repression, propaganda, co-optation—to crush opposition among youth and workers.
France’s logistical support for Rajoelina’s exfiltration illustrates its continuing imperialist role within Madagascar. Concerned with protecting its strategic interests in Malagasy energy, telecoms, and rare earths, it does not seek to defend democracy, but to stabilize a regime capable of containing and suppressing social revolts.
The Malagasy uprising is part of a global wave of worker and student mobilizations against deteriorating social conditions, the rise of authoritarian regimes and the deepening capitalist crisis. Gen Z movements in Morocco, mass strikes in Peru, workers’ struggles in Europe, and mobilizations across Africa all reflect a profound, growing rejection of austerity, militarism and the established social order.
But without revolutionary socialist leadership, spontaneous movements—no matter how massive—will be diverted, repressed or drowned in institutional compromise. The Gen Z collective, despite its mobilizing strength, lacks clear political orientation. If the working class does not organize independently, on a socialist and internationalist basis, the military regime will ultimately impose a new form of dictatorship defending the interests of capital.
This social explosion can only be understood within the context of the global capitalist crisis: persistent inflation, massive debt, imperialist wars and worsening inequality. In Madagascar as elsewhere, the national bourgeoisie—closely tied to international capital—is incapable of fulfilling the democratic and social aspirations of the masses.
Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution sheds light on the current situation. In countries dominated by imperialism, the national bourgeoisie cannot accomplish basic democratic tasks—such as eradicating poverty, providing public services or ensuring popular sovereignty—because it is organically linked to international capital. Only the working class, organized independently of all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces, can carry these struggles to completion.
As it takes power, it must link democratic demands to an internationalist socialist program, uniting with workers globally in a common struggle against world capitalism.
The struggle of Malagasy workers can only succeed if it becomes part of an international movement of the working class. Strikes in Europe, mobilizations in Africa and uprisings in Latin America are all part of the same global movement against austerity, dictatorship and war—one that demands the conscious unification of workers across borders on the basis of an internationalist socialist program.
The Malagasy crisis is not an isolated phenomenon: it is an expression of the bankruptcy of capitalism. Madagascar’s youth and workers must learn from past experiences and organize independently in rank-and-file committees, on a socialist and internationalist basis. The great political task is to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in Madagascar and across Africa, to provide revolutionary leadership to such a movement in the working class.