The Gen Z Insurgency: Why Madagascar Is a Blueprint, Not an Anomaly
The ousting of Madagascar’s president, Andry Rajoelina, is being reported as another sudden African coup. That’s a lazy and inaccurate read of the data. What happened in Antananarivo wasn’t an isolated event; it was the latest, and perhaps cleanest, execution of a replicable global playbook. Rajoelina, a 51-year-old former DJ, was ironically brought to power in 2009 by a similar youth-led movement. The symmetry is almost poetic. His removal wasn’t a shock but the predictable outcome of a formula that’s proving ruthlessly effective.
To understand this, you have to stop thinking about these events as spontaneous outpourings of anger and start seeing them as a distributed, open-source model for political disruption. The core operators are members of Generation Z (people born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s), and the pattern is now clear. Look at the data points from the last couple of years: Nepal in September 2025, Bangladesh in 2024, Sri Lanka in 2022. In each case, the sequence is nearly identical: a critical mass of digitally-native young people, mobilized via social media, channel widespread discontent over economic failure—corruption, unemployment, basic service outages—into sustained street protests that paralyze the state and force a change in leadership.
This isn't a traditional revolution with a charismatic leader and a rigid ideology. It’s more like an open-source insurgency. The base code—the tactics of online organization and offline protest—is public. Each country’s movement is a “fork” of that code, adapted for local conditions. The grievances are the user inputs: in Madagascar, it was power outages and water shortages; in Nepal, a social media ban and corruption; in Kenya, a punitive finance bill. The desired output is the same: removal of the incumbent.
A Dangerous Variable in the Equation
The Madagascar case adds a fascinating, and troubling, variable to the model: the military. The protests had been raging for weeks—three weeks, to be exact—before an elite army unit, CAPSAT, defected and joined the demonstrators. This was the tipping point that sent Rajoelina fleeing on a French military plane. A spokesperson for the movement, Elliot Randriamandrato, called it a "half-victory," acknowledging that the military’s intervention expedited the outcome. "The turning point came from the convergence of both," he said.
This raises a critical question that the triumphant headlines seem to be ignoring. Is the military’s involvement a necessary catalyst for success, or is it a dangerous hijacking of a genuinely popular movement? While protesters in Bangladesh saw a Nobel laureate replace their long-serving leader, Madagascar’s youth got Col. Michael Randrianirina, a military commander, as their interim president. They swapped one strongman for another. Just how much agency does a movement retain when its victory depends on men with guns? Does this convergence create a sustainable path to reform, or does it simply provide a convenient, populist cover for a conventional coup?
I've looked at dozens of sovereign risk reports, and what's striking here is how the demographic variable—specifically, the concentration of unemployed and digitally connected youth—is consistently mispriced as a catalyst for instability. Analysts still look for traditional opposition parties and union leaders. They’re looking for a head to the snake, when what they’re facing is a swarm of bees. In Madagascar, 75.2% of the population was below the poverty line in 2022, and the island is acutely vulnerable to climate shocks. These aren't just humanitarian statistics; they are the dry tinder for this new type of political fire.
Africa as the Next Stress Test
The conditions that made Madagascar ripe for this disruption exist across the continent, raising a critical question for the region: Gen Z protesters toppled Madagascar’s president. Should other African leaders worry? Africa has the world’s youngest population, and leaders with long tenures are sitting on a powder keg of youth unemployment and unmet expectations. We’re already seeing the model being deployed elsewhere. In Morocco, the "GenZ 212" movement is protesting the government's spending priorities. In Kenya, protests over a finance bill morphed into broader calls for regime change.
The reaction from incumbent leaders is telling. They appear fundamentally incapable of understanding the nature of the threat. When Kenyan President William Ruto dared critics to oust him before the 2027 elections, saying "let them try," he was speaking the language of a bygone era. He envisions a singular, identifiable "them" to be crushed. He doesn't grasp that he's not fighting a political rival; he's fighting a decentralized network that can mobilize thousands with a hashtag. It’s like a corporate CEO trying to shut down a torrent file instead of addressing why people are pirating his product in the first place.
Similarly, Uganda’s 81-year-old president, Yoweri Museveni, warns that demonstrators are "playing with fire." He’s ruled for nearly four decades and plans to run again. His main challenger is Bobi Wine, a 43-year-old pop star. The generational and technological gap between the ruler and the ruled has become a structural liability. Kingsley Moghalu, a former Nigerian presidential candidate, puts it bluntly: "underperforming African leaders should be very wary." He’s right. The perceived success in Madagascar will serve as a proof-of-concept, likely re-energizing movements that had lost momentum in places like Kenya and Mozambique.
The New Systemic Risk
Ultimately, what we're witnessing is the collision of 20th-century governance structures with 21st-century demographic and technological realities. This isn't about ideology—it's about performance. The Gen Z generation, globally, treats governance with the transactional pragmatism of a software user. If the system is buggy, corrupt, and fails to deliver basic services (the "user experience"), they will seek to uninstall it. Their patience is thin, their tools for mobilization are powerful, and their tolerance for the old excuses is zero. Madagascar wasn't an anomaly. It was a field test, and the model works. For investors, diplomats, and incumbents across the globe, ignoring this new, predictable driver of political instability is no longer just a forecasting error—it's a critical failure of analysis.