Why is Madagascar so unstable?

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This is the script for my video posted on July 23, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Madagascar is not a place people know much about. I’d bet money that most people’s only exposure to it is those animated movies from the 2000s, its diverse wildlife, and the vanilla the country produces. But Madagascar faces severe political unrest and natural disasters that increasingly threaten its stability and are arguably far more interesting. So why should we be paying attention to Madagascar?

The island of Madagascar was one of the last major landmasses on Earth settled by humans, and its first settlers did not come from Africa. They were Austronesian seafarers from modern Indonesia, arriving most likely a bit over a thousand years ago, though some evidence points earlier.

The prevailing theory is that they arrived on outrigger canoes, but regardless we know that they ventured across the Indian Ocean from Borneo, in part because the modern Malagasy language belongs to the Barito group of Austronesian languages from southern Borneo. Malagasy tradition remembers these earliest inhabitants as the Vazimba, a semi-legendary people whose exact identity is still debated.

Around the same era, Bantu groups crossed the Mozambique Channel from East Africa, and the two populations mixed so thoroughly that modern Malagasy carry a near even blend of both.

Madagascar's road to statehood really starts around 1540 in the central highlands with the Kingdom of Merina. Its founders descended from Hova settlers who had migrated inland from the coast generations earlier, intermarried with the Vazimba, and then turned on them, driving them from the highlands.

Merina’s founding king, Andriamanelo, ruled from a hilltop town called Alasora. His son Ralambo gave the kingdom its name and expanded it using foreign firearms obtained through trade, and it was his grandson who seized the hill of Analamanga around 1610 and founded the capital city of Antananarivo.

But in the early 18th century, one king divided Merina among his four favorite sons, which triggered nearly 80 years of bitter rivalry and intermittent warfare between the regions. That civil war was finally ended by another king who reunified the highlands and set his sights on the entire island. His son Radama I then allied with Britain for modern weapons and military training, and used that edge to conquer most of the island.

The British recognized him as King of Madagascar, and in return Radama accepted British missionaries and pledged to end slave exports. Britain sweetened the deal with weapons, uniforms, and horses. It’s worth noting that this ended the slave trade but not slavery itself, which persisted. By 1862, the monarchy was recognized internationally.

Unfortunately France invaded in 1895, and the French parliament voted to annex the island. Under military rule, they abolished the monarchy and slavery and exerted control by exploiting existing internal tensions between the Merina highlanders and the coastal peoples yet again. This division is still visible in the country’s politics today.

Immediately after WWII, reformists in the country pushed for independence. A nationalist insurrection broke out in 1947, and France responded with mass executions, aerial bombardment, and crimes against humanity. At the peak, about 30k French troops occupied the island. Nobody knows how many Malagasy died. Estimates range from around 11000 to as high as 90000, and one leading historian puts the real toll at 20 to 30 thousand, most from famine and disease as people fled into the forests.

But in 1958, Madagascar successfully became autonomous within the French Community before gaining full independence in 1960. Under the country’s first republic, ties to France remained close both economically and militarily, but this dependence on France stoked further nationalist grievances that continue to create volatility today.

The second half of the 20th century was not easy for Madagascar. A man named Didier Ratsiraka ruled from 1975 to 1992 and pursued heavy nationalization, a unique brand of socialism, and non-alignment during the Cold War. When he took power, the country was renamed from the Malagasy Republic to the Democratic Republic of Madagascar.

Economic decline ultimately led to structural adjustments and greater external accountability via funding from the World Bank and the IMF. After mass protests for democracy, Ratsiraka lost the election held across 1992 and 93, but his replacement Albert Zafy was impeached in 1996 and Ratsiraka returned in 1997. Political instability and disputed elections continued in the 2000s, and in 2001 a disputed election created months of protests and a standoff that ended with Ratsiraka fleeing and the mayor of Antananarivo, Marc Ravalomanana, becoming president.

Ravalomanana wasn’t any better. In 2008 his government shut down a tv station owned by a powerful media mogul and mayor of Antananarivo named Andry Rajoelina, who will be important shortly. Violent protests and a mutiny by an elite army unit called CAPSAT forced Ravalomanana to hand power to a military directorate, which promptly passed it to Rajoelina as transitional president. Ravalomanana fled to South Africa. The military transitional authority was deemed illegitimate, and foreign aid and investment froze, worsening an already bad economic crisis.

In 2013, constitutional order returned because key rival leaders agreed to step aside from the country’s elections under regional pressure. In 2018 Rajoelina became president, despite reports of Russian influence operations supporting him and the fact that he had obtained French citizenship in 2014, which should have automatically stripped his Madagascar citizenship. The courts still let him run, and he was reelected in 2023 with an official 59% of the vote, but turnout was only around 46% and most opposition candidates boycotted, so many saw him as an illegitimate French puppet.

Amid all of this, the country faced chronic cuts to power and water due to dysfunction and corruption at state-owned utilities, and in 2025 these grievances spread on social media and broadened to include corruption in general, the cost of living, and high youth unemployment, kicking off what we now call the Gen Z uprising.

Rajoelina’s government responded to protests with violence, with some officers using live ammunition. And though the president dismissed his government, fired the energy minister, and appointed a new PM, it didn’t fix anything. CAPSAT, which had helped bring Rajoelina to power originally in 2009, refused to fire on protesters and joined them instead.

CAPSAT seized Antananarivo on 12 October 2025, and Rajoelina fled the next day, reportedly on a French military aircraft. He tried to dissolve the National Assembly, but the Assembly ignored and impeached him. The High Constitutional Court declared the presidency vacant and invited CAPSAT colonel Michael Randrianirina to serve as president, which he has ever since as the country pursues a transition to a new government system. The African Union suspended Madagascar for this government transition, calling it unconstitutional because the court simply handed power to a military leader.

All of this instability has made Madagascar one of the world’s poorest countries and one of very few that is poorer now than it was when it gained independence. Only about a third of people even have electricity, or about 10m of a population of 30m.

The country’s resources are limited. It produces about 80% of the world’s natural vanilla, but vanilla is one of the most price-volatile commodities on Earth, with prices swinging from roughly $600/kg to $20/kg within weeks. Farmers remain trapped in poverty and are often hit by theft, tropical cyclones, and price crashes that are impossible to plan around.

Mining is roughly 40% of the country’s exports but under 5% of GDP because large-scale foreign projects focus on raw material extraction and rely heavily on expensive imported machinery rather than local labor, so Madagascar sees little benefit. But in January 2026 they lifted a 16-year moratorium on new mining permits under a new mining code that could position the country as a focal point for the critical minerals race between the US, China, and the EU.

The infrastructure issues I mentioned are hugely disruptive to investment. Foreign companies expect a degree of stability with water and power that Madagascar can’t provide. France remains the former colonial power with the greatest economic, military, and cultural ties, but those ties are controversial, and France’s control of the unoccupied Scattered Islands in the Mozambique Channel is a point of contention because Madagascar wants control of their waters for potential fishing and hydrocarbon exploitation and France refuses. This has become even more important lately because the Mozambique Channel is a more important maritime chokepoint when the Red Sea route for container traffic is disrupted.

The factors outside Madagascar’s control are arguably more dangerous. Cyclones are growing more destructive due to climate change. Southern Madagascar experienced severe drought in 2021 and 2022, which the country’s broken infrastructure turned into a deadly famine. And as the country tries to exploit its own resources, deforestation threatens much of the wildlife that makes the country so beautiful and special.

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