Didier Ratsiraka
Long-serving president of Madagascar whose socialist ‘revolution’ nearly ruined his country
DIDIER RATSIRAKA, who has died aged 84, served twice as the president of Madagascar, from 1975 to 1991 and again from 1997 to 2002, dominating the troubled politics of the Indian Ocean island for nearly three decades.
During his first stint in office he launched a socialist revolution and forged close ties to Kim Il Sung of North Korea, Fidel Castro of Cuba and the Soviet Union. He was a charismatic former naval officer, and these policies earned him the nickname “the Red Admiral”, as well as initial popular support.
Rather than lift his country out of poverty, however, his disastrous brand of Malagasy socialism and its principle of a state-directed “revolution from above” brought economic ruin. By the early 1980s his government was forced to seek a bail-out from the International Monetary Fund and introduce free-market reforms.
These measures did much to cut Madagascar’s unsustainable levels of debt, but corruption and chronic inefficiencies continued, and as time went on Ratsiraka’s authoritarian political instincts increasingly came to the fore. As austerity began to bite, opposition to his rule intensified and his regime was rocked by waves of civil protest, rural revolts and attempted coups. When he won a third term in 1989 with 62 per cent of the vote, protesters alleging massive fraud poured on to the streets. He introduced multiparty democracy a year later but the move did little to appease popular opinion.
The situation came to a head in August 1991 when Ratsiraka ordered his presidential bodyguard to fire on a crowd of 400,000 demonstrators demanding his resignation outside his official residence.
Some 130 people were killed, prompting France, the former colonial power, to withdraw its support for his regime. Ratsiraka lost elections held the following year and left for exile in Paris.
He returned to Madagascar and won the 1997 presidential election. Once again his time in office ended in turmoil; he refused to concede defeat in elections held in December 2001 and clung to power. The ensuing crisis briefly split Madagascar in two – with two capitals and two armies – and threatened to spill over into a full-blown civil war.
After a seven-month impasse, Ratsiraka eventually returned to exile in his plush Paris suburb. In 2003 he was convicted of stealing $8 million from the central bank just before he quit Madagascar and was sentenced in absentia to 10 years’ hard labour.
The youngest of 10 children, Didier Ratsiraka was born on November 4 1936 in Vatomandry, a city on the east coast of the island. His father Albert was a freed slave who worked a series of menial jobs before becoming a translator for the colonial administration and participating in the anti-french revolt of 1947. Didier’s mother was Marcelline (née Rafilipo).
A precocious student, in 1960 he won a government scholarship to study at France’s renowned naval academy in Brest. There he gained a reputation as a resourceful officer, and graduated as the second-best student in a cohort mostly made up of young French aristocrats. He returned to Madagascar in 1963 as the first Malagasy officer in its navy.
After a brief stint as military attaché at Madagascar’s Paris embassy, and further studies in France, in 1972 he became the foreign minister of Gabriel Ramanantsoa’s military regime. He renegotiated Madagascar’s status as a French protectorate, which did much to bolster his image and his credentials as a future leader.
Ratsiraka was appointed president by the country’s military leadership in June 1975, after his predecessor was gunned down after six days in the job. Six months later his position was confirmed when he won the election with 95 per cent of the vote.
He set about installing a Marxist system of government, launching Madagascar’s Second Republic and nationalising key sectors of the economy hitherto dominated by French private companies.
These policies won him widespread public approval, but within two years he faced protests over food shortages. He responded with force, using the army to stamp out the country’s evolving opposition, and denting his image of a champion of the downtrodden.
He was re-elected with 80 per cent of the vote in 1982, but only won 62 per cent in 1989 amid accusations of electoral fraud. Over the next two years protests tipped into rebellion, and after a brutal attempt to crack down on the opposition he was forced to resign.
During his second period as president, from 1997 to 2002, Ratsiraka successfully sought to dramatically increase the power of the presidency through a constitutional referendum, granting himself the power to dissolve parliament and the ability to appoint a government without parliamentary scrutiny.
He returned to Madagascar in 2011, two years after the government that had replaced his regime was toppled in a coup, and without having to serve his prison sentence for corruption. Afterwards he appeared regularly on talk shows as a political pundit.
Didier Ratsiraka married his wife Céline in 1964; they had four children.
Didier Ratsiraka, born November 4 1936, died March 28 2021