🇲🇬 MADAGASCAR STABILITY INDEX

Protests began September 25, 2025 over chronic power and water failures — some Antananarivo residents had paid for six waterless years — and metastasized into a generational revolt against poverty, corruption, and impunity.

• The template: Organized as "Gen Z Madagascar," explicitly modeled on the youth uprisings in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Kenya — leaderless, digital, service-delivery-triggered.
• The pivot point: Security forces' lethal response radicalized the street; when CAPSAT sided with the demonstrators, the government's coercive floor vanished and Rajoelina left on a French military aircraft.
• Coalition breadth: Unions, civic groups, and churches joined — the uprising's legitimacy is why the AU response has been pressure rather than full pariah treatment.
• Standing risk: The same street that made the transition can unmake it — utility performance is now a national-security metric, which is why this page's sensors weight blackout and fuel-crisis language.

Madagascar is suspended-in-practice from continental normalcy: the AU Peace and Security Council demands a "swift and full return to constitutional order through a civilian-led transitional government" and credible elections, with a field mission mandated and SADC reporting deadlines imposed.

• SADC chairmanship forfeited: Antananarivo stepped aside from the rotating chair citing the "exceptional national context" — a quiet admission of its irregular status.
• The February 2026 report: Randrianirina committed a transition plan to SADC's December 2025 summit demand; slippage on that paper trail is the cleanest measure of drift.
• Leverage reality: France pledged transition support (food security, urban projects); donors condition budget aid on the election roadmap — in a country where aid is fiscal oxygen.
• The military-transition dilemma: AU doctrine prohibits coup normalization, but the uprising's popularity makes hard sanctions politically awkward — the same gray zone Guinea just exited via elections.

The JIRAMA utility's collapse — rolling blackouts and dry taps — was the uprising's proximate cause and remains the transition's hardest problem. In April 2026 the cabinet declared a 15-day nationwide energy emergency amid fuel shortages linked to the Iran-war shock.

• Import exposure: Madagascar imports essentially all refined fuel; Middle East disruption and freight repricing hit generation, pumping, and transport simultaneously — a textbook case for the platform's cross-theater commodity coupling.
• JIRAMA's spiral: Decades of underinvestment, tariff politics, and arrears; emergency generation contracts bleed the budget while service stays unreliable.
• Delivery politics: The transition's declared priorities — water, electricity, basic services — make every outage a political event; the 16-year lifting of a mining-permit freeze (January 2026) signals a revenue hunt.
• Sensor note: Blackout, fuel-crisis, and JIRAMA language are wired into this page's escalation keywords — utility failure is Madagascar's conflict-probability proxy.

Roughly three-quarters of ~30 million Malagasy live in poverty — among the world's highest rates — atop an economy of vanilla, textiles, tourism, and minerals, all hostage to political shock and climate volatility.

• Vanilla dominance: Madagascar supplies the large majority of world vanilla; price cycles whipsaw the northeast's rural economy (queued for the commodity tracker's soft-commodity coverage).
• Critical minerals runway: Nickel-cobalt (Ambatovy), graphite, and ilmenite give Madagascar an energy-transition card; the permit-freeze lift reopens that door under fiscal desperation.
• Cyclone alley: Repeated cyclone seasons (Batsirai, Freddy legacy) plus southern drought-famine episodes make Madagascar a standing humanitarian caseload — climate is a structural stability input here, not background.
• Tourism/investment freeze: Post-coup uncertainty stalls the two inflows the transition most needs; every AU communique prices directly into arrivals and FDI.

A military transition's first threat is its own reflection. In April 2026, authorities detained a former French soldier over an alleged destabilization plot — planned mutiny incitement, infrastructure sabotage, and nationwide disruption.

• Intra-military geometry: CAPSAT made two presidents in sixteen years; rival units, gendarmerie equities, and promotion grievances are the coup-watch variables — quiet-before-storm logic applies.
• Rajoelina factor: The ousted president (in Gulf exile) retains networks and, reportedly, French citizenship complications; a return gambit or loyalist mobilization is a scenario, not a prediction.
• The dahalo south: Cattle-raiding banditry and drought banditry in the deep south persist below the national headline — a chronic security drain on a stretched gendarmerie.
• Convergence frame: Plot arrests + utility failure + AU-deadline stress stacking in the same window is the compound read this page exists to surface.