Category World News

Madagascan president to address nation as protesters call for new rallies

By in News, World News

Madagascar’s embattled President Andry Rajoelina has announced he will address the nation amid pressure from protesters and from within the military for him to resign.

The presidency announced on Monday that Rajoelina would deliver a televised address at 7pm local time (16:00 GMT). Meanwhile, with persistent rumours that he has lost control of the country, protesters have called for new rallies in the capital, Antananarivo.

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Student-led demonstrations across recent weeks have met with aggression from authorities. However, the president was forced to take a backward step over the weekend as an elite military unit came out in support of the protesters’ demand that he quit.

Soldiers from the CAPSAT unit openly sided with the protesters on Saturday.

The following day, Rajoelina declared that a coup was taking place, as CAPSAT installed a new military chief during a ceremony attended by the armed forces minister, who welcomed the appointment.

Home or abroad?

The president’s whereabouts are currently unknown.

Authorities have asserted that he is in Madagascar and managing national affairs. However, hundreds returned to the streets on Monday in a celebratory mood amid rumours that Rajoelina has fled.

Some soldiers joined the crowd, with students hanging from military vehicles and brandishing flags.

The student group leading the protest movement, which has called itself Gen Z, has called for another demonstration on Monday.

The military intervention marks a dramatic escalation in unrest that erupted on September 25 over chronic electricity and water shortages, before evolving into wider calls for political change.

“We responded to the people’s call,” a commander of the CAPSAT unit, Colonel Michael Randrianirina, told reporters.

The defection carries particular significance given CAPSAT’s pivotal role in the 2009 military-backed coup that brought Rajoelina to power.

The military has repeatedly intervened in politics since Madagascar gained independence from France in 1960.

On Sunday, crowds gathered at the symbolic May 13 Square – the traditional heart of political uprisings in Antananarivo – to celebrate alongside CAPSAT soldiers, who drove through in armoured vehicles to cheers from protesters waving national flags.

RFI, France’s public broadcaster, reported that among those present was former President Marc Ravalomanana, whom Rajoelina ousted.

Positioning himself as a reformist, Rajoelina led a transitional government until 2014, stepping aside to restore constitutional order. He returned after winning the 2019 election and secured a second full term in 2023.

The United Nations says at least 22 people have been killed and more than 100 injured since demonstrations began, although the government disputes these figures. One CAPSAT soldier died in clashes with the gendarmerie on Saturday.

The protests have exposed deep frustration in one of the world’s poorest nations, where only a third of the population has access to electricity and blackouts routinely exceed eight hours a day.

The Gen Z Madagascar movement, at the heart of the protests, has drawn inspiration from uprisings that have challenged governments in several countries, including Kenya, Indonesia and Peru, recently.

Such youth-led demonstrations have helped to unseat governments in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Trio to share economics Nobel for work on innovation-driven growth

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The Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded for work on technology’s impact on sustained economic growth.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday that the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 would be shared among American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, France’s Philippe Aghion and Canada’s Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth”.

The award was based on the idea that vast numbers of people have been lifted out of poverty over the past two centuries as the world has seen sustained economic growth with technology the underlying cause. Previously, stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history, the jury said in a statement.

Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University in the United States, won half of the prize for using historical records to identify what changed during the Industrial Revolution.

His research showed lasting growth depends on grasping why technologies function, not merely observing that they do. Before that understanding developed during the Industrial Revolution, it was difficult to build upon new discoveries and inventions.

Aghion, from College de France and The London School of Economics, and Howitt, from Brown University in the US, share the other half of the prize “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction,” the jury said.

In an article published in 1992, they developed a mathematical framework for “creative destruction,” a concept popularised by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in the early 1900s, describing how new products replace old ones in the marketplace.

The award has a total cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2m), which Mokyr will split with Aghion and Howitt.

The economics prize wraps up this year’s Nobel season, which honoured research into the human immune system, practical applications of quantum mechanics and the development of new forms of molecular architecture.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was awarded the highly watched Nobel Peace Prize.

She surprised many when she dedicated it to US President Donald Trump, who had made no secret of the fact that he thought he deserved it.

The economics prize is the only Nobel not among the original five created in the will of Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.

‘Everybody is a fighter’: Inside a First Nation’s quest for justice

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Dressed in winter coats, scarves and hats to guard against freezing temperatures, Grassy Narrows residents spent weeks at the blockade site to stop logging trucks from getting to the Whiskey Jack Forest to pick up wood.

Schoolchildren were bussed in to take part in the fight. Archival footage from Canada’s public broadcaster CBC shows a line of determined young people blocking a truck on a dirt road. “We believe in traditional land … not clearcutting,” read one sign held up by a land defender.

“There must have been about 50 to 75 kids stopping trucks. Trucks just stopped, and they didn’t want to move,” recalls JB, who took part in the direct action.

Residents set up a makeshift encampment, where they cooked over woodfires and held ceremonies. With locked arms, they stood or lay down in front of the trucks.

And when some of the loggers tried to reach the forest via alternative access routes, those were quickly blocked too. “They’d come at 3 o’clock in the morning to get our wood. So we started getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning to go and blockade,” JB explains.

JB took part in the blockade in the early 2000s [Jillian Kestler-D’Amours]

The community’s sustained fight – the blockade still stands today – led to results: In 2008, the logging company gave up its clear-cutting in the area, citing the uncertainty, delays and added costs caused by the land defenders.

“At first, a lot of people were scared. That was a very confrontational [approach], but [the fear] didn’t last long,” says Williamson, who took part in the blockade himself.

“Physically stopping the cutting of trees … seemed more real than sitting down at the table with people that are not listening,” he adds. “The more we saw the results of physically blocking and occupying the land, we saw that was the only way that anyone would listen.”

A documentary shot by local journalists from the early days of the blockade shows community members confronting a forestry industry contractor after he is told he won’t be able to truck away the logs.

“The beef isn’t here,” the contractor says, telling the land defenders to go to company and industry offices with their grievances instead. “We’ve done that,” a community member responds. Eventually, the truck turns back down the road.

Isaacs says what she remembers most about that time was the sense of community that grew out of Grassy Narrows’s stand.

“We were all doing something,” Isaacs says while sitting in front of a fire at a clearing in the forest where the blockade started more than 20 years ago.

“We were all busy chopping [firewood], keeping the fire cooking. For the first time, I was like, ‘This is how our people felt when they were working together in a village, in a community. This is what it felt like.’”

LISTEN: Judy Da Silva, Chrissy Isaacs and Indigenous elder Chickadee Richard sing by a campfire at the site where the community first resisted logging.

Today, a wooden cabin, wigwam and other structures sit at the blockade site, just off a dirt road. Community members use the area for ceremonies and other gatherings. The wooden gate that was used to block logging trucks still stands.

“Our people, our community, we’re really resilient,” says Isaacs, whose front-line activism continues.

She recently set up a tent outside Queen’s Park, the Ontario legislature in Toronto, to protest against a new law known as Bill 5, which allows the province to bypass environmental regulations and Indigenous rights to build major resource projects.

When she got home, community members told her they, too, were ready to protect the land and the water against Bill 5. “’If we go back out there, I’ll be there,’” she says people told her.