In October 2025, Madagascar’s president Andry Rajoelina fled the country as thousands of young protesters filled the streets of Antananarivo, demanding an end to corruption, failing infrastructure, and a broken educational system. The protests, organized largely through social media and led by Generation Z, culminated in a military-backed coup and Rajoelina’s impeachment by Parliament (France 24, 2025; NPR, 2025). What had begun as scattered student demonstrations over unpaid university grants had grown, over four years of compounding frustration, into a mass political uprising. That trajectory — from a Facebook post about student riots to the fall of a government — is the story this paper set out to understand. This paper examines the public discourse surrounding Madagascar’s postsecondary education crisis as it has unfolded across social media platforms, focusing on the conversational landscape in which students, parents, educators, and bystanders debate, argue, mock, and mourn the state of Malagasy education. It argues that while social media conversations do not by themselves drive change, they serve as a critical barometer of popular sentiment and, crucially, as an accelerant that can transform grievance into action — a point the events of 2025 made with historic force
Rakotonjanabelo et al. (Sun,) studied this question.