Politics in Madagascar

This will probably be my most boring post for most of my readers but I am an International Political Economy major, so it is interesting to me. Plus, nothing too eventful has happened this week since I returned from Vatomandry (editors note: “nothing too eventful” means I do not have any full stories to tell. In the scheme of an American day, there have been plenty of eventful days, but if I kept that frame of reference, I would ALWAYS be writing on here…). That being said, I wanted to give you guys a brief history of the politics here and the current situation as well. Not sure how much you already know, but I will assume it is nothing, sorry.

I would like to start off by saying that in Madagascar’s history – as a monarchy before colonization, as a French colony, and as an independent state – they have never experienced a transition of power via democratic election. Not once have the people in power giving said authority to the winner of a democratic election. I would also like to add as a general fact that since Madagascar gained its independence in 1960, every president has changed the constitution to benefit themselves and their party, therefore stripping it of its value as a political force. The leader of Madagascar, from royal monarch through current president, has traditionally enjoyed too much power with very weak systems of checks and balance in place. There is also a strong pattern of political parties losing all influence once their president is out of office and thus, no oppositional party is ever able to do anything.

This is just meant to be a brief history so I am going to skip most of the past, until 2002 when the last president, Mark Ravolamanana, took over. He was a very business oriented president and actually did quite a bit for development. He helped stimulate the agriculture here and decreased poverty by about 20-25% in his first 5 years in office. However, he had a lot of close personal ties to big business in Madagascar and began blurring the lines of politics and economics. He helped create monopolies and used his position as president for personal gain. A final straw was placed when he began negotiations with a Korean (I believe) company about selling land to them. It is currently illegal for any non-Malagasy people to own land here and that, among other things, started the protests.

He was eventually forced to handover power to the military and flee to South Africa. There are plenty of articles on the events that went on during the 2009 political crisis, for anyone interested, I’m sure a simple google search will yield more than you can read. The military then aligned with Andry Rajoelina and his newly formed TGV party. Rajoelina was appointed the president in 2009 and is still in power now, as the alleged “popular” choice. He was, and is, too young to be President according to the constitution so one of his first acts was lowering the minimum age to 35. From what I have gathered, from talking to my host family and an admittedly small section of Malgasy people, is that he is not too popular here. For one, crime and poverty have gone up in the last few years along with the price of most everything because of their need to import so much these days.

In his defense, about 80% of the economy is “informal” meaning that it is unregulated by the government and therefore untaxed. The informal economy includes subsidence farming and street vending, just to give a couple examples. Before Rajoelina took over, about 75% of the government budget came from foreign aid from the US, Europe and other countries. However, since the ’09 crisis, the givers fail to recognize this “popular” government and have cut off all non-humanitarian aid to Madagascar. I do not know enough to make judgments on his term but I cannot imagine any government would be effective if it lost ¾ of its budget instantly.

There are elections scheduled to take place early next year but it is almost certain that some controversy or opposition to the results will arise. In addition, the Malagasy people seem less and less interested in politics. Especially after their last political demonstrations in ’09 were met with bullets from the army – many were in disbelief that the government would shed Malagasy blood and the blame feel on Ravalomanana forcing him to flee.

So there is a very brief and very gap-filled history of Madagascar’s current political situation.