Military seizes power in Madagascar as president impeached

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By Editor_1
Colonel Michael Randrianirina addresses protesters gathered outside the town hall on Independence Avenue during a nationwide youth-led demonstration against frequent power outages and water shortages, in Antananarivo, Madagascar, on Tuesday (October 14, 2025) -Zo Andrianjafy/Reuters

By Eden Ezra

ANTANANARIVO -An elite Madagascar military unit said Tuesday (14) it had taken power of the Indian Ocean nation after the national assembly voted to impeach President Andry Rajoelina following weeks of anti-government protests.

Rajoelina, who was in hiding reportedly out of the country, had late Monday (13) refused demands to step down from a protest movement that started on September 25 and won the backing of the CAPSAT military unit at the weekend.

CAPSAT commander Colonel Michael Randrianirina read out a statement at the presidential palace suspending the constitution and saying the unit would set up a governing committee composed of officers from the army, gendarmerie and national police.

“Perhaps in time it will include senior civilian advisers. It is this committee that will carry out the work of the presidency,” Randrianirina said. “At the same time, after a few days, we will set up a civilian government.”

“We have taken power,” he confirmed to AFP afterwards.

After the announcement, officers from the unit rolled through the capital in armoured Humvees and pick-up trucks en route to their base, where hundreds of soldiers stood in formation to receive them, AFP journalists saw.

Crowds lined the pavements, cheering and waving as they passed, while some followed the convoy in their own cars, honking their horns in a victory lap through a city still on edge.

The Constitutional Court later confirmed Randrianirina’s authority and declared the presidency vacant. Under Madagascar’s constitution, the top court must validate the president’s impeachment for it to take effect.

But the presidency denounced the military’s action as “a clear act of attempted coup” that it did not accept.

“The President of the Republic remains fully in office and ensures the maintenance of constitutional order and national stability,” it said.

The near-daily protests, led by a youth movement called Gen Z, were ignited by anger over power and water shortages, and grew into a movement against the president and the ruling elite.

They took a turn at the weekend when CAPSAT – which played a major role in the 2009 coup that first brought Rajoelina to power — joined the demonstrators, followed by the gendarmerie, which admitted to “faults and excesses” in their attempts to quell the demonstration,s which left several people dead.

Parliamentarians pushed ahead with the vote to impeach Rajoelina for desertion of duty despite a presidential decree ordering the dissolution of the national assembly.

The vote passed with 130 votes in favour – well above the two-thirds constitutional threshold required. The presidency said the session was “devoid of any legal basis”.

After reports that he had left the country with the assistance of France, Rajoelina — who has French nationality — said in a national address late Monday that he was in a “safe place to protect my life”.

He did not reveal his location, but some reports said he may have gone to Dubai.

Making clear he would not step down, Rajoelina said he was “on a mission to find solutions” to the political crisis and would not let the impoverished nation “destroy itself”.

At a fresh rally outside city hall Tuesday, demonstrators expressed anger at France, the colonial ruler until independence in 1960, accusing it of meddling in the island’s affairs.

“It’s like they’re colonising us again,” said civil engineer Koloina Rakotomavonirina, 26. “We want them to leave our island for good.”

“They are taking the piss,” said 29-year-old orthodontist Ramalanjaona Valimbavaka Bien Aime.

The United Nations has said at least 22 people were killed in the first days of the protests, but the government dismissed the toll, saying only a dozen looters and vandals had died.

To try to defuse the protests, Rajoelina sacked his entire government last month. Meeting one of the demands of the protesters, the president of the Senate was replaced.

-Agence France-Presse

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