Madagascar: power to the people?

The government of Marc Ravalomanana has been replaced by that of former DJ Andry Rajoelina. Madagascar is unique in Africa - many Malagasys prefer not to be thought of as Africans at all - in that its recent leaders have not had to wait until they gain power to acquire great wealth. Ravalomanana owed his fortunes to yoghurts and dairy products; Rajoelina has made a packet on bill-boards. He is rich and cannot present himself as a mouth-piece for the downtrodden masses against a grasping rapacious autocrat.

He is mistaken if he believes he's come to power on the crest of a popular revolution. Andry Rajoelina is in power today because the army switched their support to him. Why they did that is unclear: that is was for good motives is unlikely. What's certain is that he is now a hostage of the military. They gave him power, and what they gave, they can take away.

Recent events in Madagascar can hardly be called a victory for democracy. Ravalomanana won the last two elections fairly and quite squarely. Rajoelina is reluctant to hold a new election to legitimize his rise to power. For one thing, he's too young and the constitution bars people below a certain age from holding the presidency. Well what's a constitution only a scrap of paper? It wouldn't be the first to be torn up, and (worryingly) it wouldn't be the last.

The major problem facing Madagascar now is a lack of legitimacy by the new rulers. Try as they might to portray Ravalomanana as a greedy dictator the facts are that he still has massive support, especially in the countryside and among the middle classes. He made serious mistakes (what ruler hasn't) but his rule saw considerable benefits for many Madagascans. For too long the fourth largest island in the world was just a quite backwater of neo-colonialist Francophonie policies, too easily described as a "former French colony." Madagascar has the potential to be a bridge, cultural and economic, between south-east Asia and Africa. Many inhabitants of the island are descended from Indonesian and Malay settlers who landed on the island maybe a millennium ago. Their language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian group. Ravalomanana was trying to tease his country away from its Francophonie heritage of colonial misrule and rubbing shoulders with corrupt states further north on the African continent.

Rajoelina has diverted his country away from possible posterity towards political instability in which it will unfortunately find too much in common with states in continental Africa.