Madagascar is a large island nation off the south-east coast of Africa. France ruled the island until 1960. Since then GDP per person has shrunk by almost a half, the largest fall of any nation without a civil war. The population has grown from 5m to 32m since 1960, while forest coverage has fallen from 33m hectares to 6m.
The country has roughly 20 ethnic groups, which can be crudely divided between those of south-east Asian origin in the interior and coastal peoples with mainland African roots.
The vast majority of workers are subsistence farmers. Their productivity and incomes are "trending down", according to the World Bank, partly because of deteriorating soil conditions brought on by drought and deforestation. Basic infrastructure is calamitous: there are perhaps half as many paved roads as there were in 1960. It costs more to take goods from Antananarivo, the capital, to Tamatave, a port 200km away, than it does to then ship the produce to France. It would take more than 70 years at recent growth rates for Madagascan living standards to catch up with those of Rwanda and Uganda.
Madagascar has been described as "a mafia state". Corruption is routine: one civil servant says she regularly has to decline envelopes of cash from foreign businessmen. The country's natural resources have been plundered through deals between corrupt locals and foreign buyers, involving gold, lychees, vanilla, rosewood, tortoises and the island's endemic lemurs. In 2023 a British court found President Rajoelina's former chief of staff guilty of soliciting bribes from a gem-mining firm.
Many of Madagascar's economic difficulties stem from the socialist experiments of Didier Ratsiraka, president from 1975 to 1993 (and again from 1997 to 2002), whom the CIA thought wanted to turn the island into North Korea.
Andry Rajoelina, a former DJ and pedlar of herbal cures for covid-19, first came to power after demonstrations in 2009 against the elected president, Marc Ravalomanana, led indirectly to a military coup by CAPSAT, an elite military unit. CAPSAT ultimately ceded power to Rajoelina. He led Madagascar for most of the time since, helped by some dubious election wins. Mamy Ravatomanga, a businessman, is seen by many as the power behind the throne.
In 2002 the army helped avert a civil war after a rigged election by eventually siding with the candidate who genuinely won.
Madagascar is the loneliest country on earth according to Gallup World Poll data analysed by the WHO and The Economist in 2025. An astonishing 60% of people in southern Madagascar reported feeling lonely the previous day. Roughly 70% of the population subsist on less than $3 a day. Poverty, internal migration across the vast and roadless island, and lack of running water (forcing hours of daily drudgery) all contribute.
Madagascar became an island around 90m years ago, leaving its inhabitants evolutionarily isolated. Around 80% of the plant species found there today live nowhere else in the world. The eastern rainforest once stretched 1,600km along the island's entire east coast. Between 2001 and 2024 a quarter of the country's native rainforest vanished; some 215,000 hectares have been lost each year since 2001. At this rate all of Madagascar's primary forests will be gone by 2100.
The Madagascar periwinkle is the source of vinblastine, vincristine and vinorelbine, a trio of anti-cancer medicines. Kew Madagascar, an outpost of the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, is the only Kew office outside Britain, employing around 60 staff who collect seeds from threatened plants for preservation in the Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex. In Ankarafantsika National Park, a dry forest in the north of the country, the Kew team has planted 30,000 seedlings across six hectares of degraded land. A species of aloe presumed extinct—last seen in 1910—was recently rediscovered by the team at a remote site.
In the south it is common for people to spend more on their tombs than their houses. In the central highlands the practice of famadihana ("turning of the bones"), where corpses are exhumed from tombs in ceremonies to appease the family's ancestors, can eat into household budgets.
In late September and early October 2025 Madagascar saw the largest protests in more than 15 years. Demonstrators were fed up with persistent power cuts, water shortages and rampant corruption. Worsening rural poverty and fast population growth had caused a surge of migration to cities, adding pressure on ageing power and water systems. Rajoelina responded by sacking his entire cabinet and imposing a dawn-to-dusk curfew.
On October 12th 2025 Michael Randrianirina, a colonel in CAPSAT, launched a coup and appointed himself interim president on October 14th. Rajoelina fled the country in a French military aircraft and is reportedly in Dubai. The coup was the tenth successful African putsch of the 2020s, a decade that had already seen more coups than the 2000s or the 2010s. Randrianirina, 51, is from the south and a member of a tribe with roots in mainland Africa—a rare Malagasy leader not from the dominant Merina ethnic group. He has pledged to hold elections within two years.
Consultant, n.: (1) Someone you pay to take the watch off your wrist and tell you what time it is.