Madagascar’s Junta tightens its Authoritarian grip

Eight months after the coup of October 2025, Madagascar’s transition is showing an increasingly authoritarian face.

SADC has just issued Antananarivo its firmest demands to date, while the opposition is silenced, the judiciary tamed, and Russian influence embeds itself firmly within the state apparatus. The picture drawn by the regional bloc is no longer that of a transition going off course, but of a regime consolidating itself.

The declaration by SADC (the Southern African Development Community) is striking. The organisation now demands the “release of political prisoners”, an “end to the arbitrary arrests of opposition leaders and members of Generation Z”, and the return of “political exiles” to the country.

This is no longer a diplomatic warning: it is an admission of failure. In formulating these demands, the pan-African institution acknowledges and ratifies nine months of authoritarian drift by a transition that had promised rupture and renewal. It casts doubt, at the very least, on the sincerity of some of its promoters, and underlines the passivity of the others.

The declaration comes just days after the June episode surrounding the High Constitutional Court (HCC), which saw a de facto takeover of the country’s highest court by the junta. Two judges facing prosecution for “destabilising the regime” resigned on 18 June; they were replaced less than twenty-four hours later. Before them, three other members had already been replaced by decree in December 2025. The HCC, the keystone of Madagascar’s constitutional system and the body charged with validating election results, no longer offers even minimal guarantees of independence. The sincerity of any eventual transition towards democratic elections is increasingly openly questioned; and even were a ballot to be held, its authenticity would now hang in the balance.

This prospect of a return to democracy is further compromised by the growing infiltration of the state apparatus by Russia. The Speaker of the National Assembly, Siteny Randrianasoloniaiko, travelled to Moscow as early as November 2025 to open multidimensional cooperation, ranging from energy to “cooperation between media outlets”.

More recently, the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) undertook a training trip to Russia, a country whose standards on free elections are hardly a global benchmark. The rapprochement with Moscow is not merely diplomatic; it is institutional. And it steers the transition towards a model that liberal democracies rightly distrust.

Opposition silenced

To these institutional concerns is added an increasingly toxic political climate. For three months, the opposition has been methodically reduced to silence, all the more striking given that some of those targeted had themselves supported or tolerated the October 2025 coup. Paradoxically, a few now take a less critical, even nostalgic, view of the Rajoelina years.

In early June, MP Antoine Rajerison had his parliamentary immunity lifted by the National Assembly. The stated cause: the filing of an impeachment case against Colonel Randrianirina, an act that is nonetheless constitutionally provided for. Colonel Patrick Rakotomamonjy, former director in charge of grievances at the presidency of the Refoundation and a figure of the October uprising, was arrested in April, officially for “conspiracy against the state”, after having, in the preceding weeks, publicly denounced corruption within the regime. Paul Rabary, leader of the Ny Fireneko party and former Minister of National Education, was imprisoned in May for “undermining state security”, on the basis of exchanges whose interpretation remains contested by his supporters. In each of these cases, the same mechanism recurs: a charge of variable geometry, a swift arrest, a blurred legal justification.

Within civil society, distrust, even hostility, is at its peak. Several leaders of Gen Z Madagascar were arrested in the middle of the night after publicly distancing themselves from the junta. As early as March, Amnesty International had denounced the use of “deliberately vague accusations of criminal conspiracy or threats to national security” to silence activists.

In parallel, the government has announced plans for a law to regulate social media. While press freedom does not yet appear to be frontally threatened, such a law would curb precisely the terrain on which Gen Z has built its effectiveness: its mastery of digital platforms.

The Catholic Church, which represents nearly a quarter of the population, issued an unambiguous statement in May, pointing to “the arrest of those who do not share the views of those in power” and demanding a clear electoral roadmap. A warning the regime cannot afford to ignore for long.

Creeping militarisation

To political repression is added a methodical “colonisation” of the state’s key posts by the military. Colonel Randrianirina surrounds himself with four senior military advisers at the presidency. Colonel René de Rolland Urbain Lylison heads the Ministry of Territorial Planning; a general chairs the Malagasy sovereign wealth fund; the leadership of JIRAMA, the national water and electricity utility, has been entrusted to General Tibar Otman; the Office of National Mines and Strategic Industries (OMNIS), which oversees mining permits, has been run since November by a brigadier general. At regional level, several acting provincial heads come from the police, the gendarmerie or the army. Control of resources and territory is systematic.

Worse still, the Africa Corps, the Russian military structure that succeeded the Wagner Group on the continent, completed on 5 May in Antananarivo the training of more than a hundred Malagasy soldiers, including special forces and the presidential guard. Moscow is thus training the men responsible for the physical protection of Colonel Randrianirina. This Russian praetorian guard amounts to a life-insurance policy for the regime and deeply distorts the internal balance of power: it renders any pressure or handover through institutional channels even more uncertain. The entanglement between the junta and Moscow is no longer merely diplomatic — it is now a matter of security.

Democratic wait-and-see

After Amnesty International, the Catholic Church and now SADC, the diagnosis is no longer a warning: it describes a system settling in. In Madagascar, the checks and balances are being methodically neutralised, the opposition criminalised, and the security institutions locked down with Moscow’s backing. The transition no longer opens a democratic horizon: it stabilises a durable political order built on internal control and external alignments. One more “democrature”, added to an already familiar list on the continent.

In this process, the UN and the major liberal democracies are no longer mere onlookers. By consistently prioritising stability, the continuity of partnerships and the day-to-day management of diplomatic equilibria, they too contribute, indirectly but concretely, to normalising this erosion of rights. Inaction, or a belated response, does not neutralise the dynamics at work: it makes them bearable, and therefore lasting.

One simple question remains, though rarely posed head-on in Washington, Brussels, Paris, London, Tokyo or Canberra: at what point does a “transition” cease to be an unstable interlude and become a regime that one ends up endorsing — sometimes even by contributing to it through inaction?