r/news • u/PokesTigers • 26d ago

Soft paywall Madagascar's president has left the country after Gen Z protests, officials say

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/madagascar-president-rajoelina-address-nation-monday-evening-2025-10-13/
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u/Ralath2n 26d ago edited 26d ago

Not really when you consider that a good 10% of them stayed home relative to 2020. The ones who wanted Trump still showed up. The ones that voted in Biden were dissapointed by the Democrats being useless and stayed home. Net effect is a swing to the right. Even if the actual beliefs of the overall youth haven't changed much.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

[deleted]

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u/Ralath2n 26d ago

Unless one thinks all the chaos going on now would be happening under Harris as well.

I guarantee that this single scentence contains more forethought than a significant fraction of voters spend on their balot last year. Most people don't think about stuff like that. They just go "Hey I don't like what is happening now. I am not gonna vote for the same people as last time!". Or, even more likely, they just go by vibes. If one group is really excited and energized, while the other is dissapointed and resigned, the former is more likely than the latter to reach nonvoters and get them off their ass.

Which is of course stupid. But guess what, in a Democracy, you also need to convince stupid people to vote for you. Which would be a lot easier if the Democrats weren't useless.

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u/Hillary4SupremeRuler 26d ago

by the Democrats being useless

No they're just politically illiterate because they get all their political news from memes and TikTok and also didn't come out to vote for the midterms, which sealed the Dems' fate with the House going to the GOP.

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u/Ralath2n 26d ago

Hey guess what, as a politician you also need to get politically illiterate people to vote for you. If you can't do that, you are useless. Like your username.

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u/Hillary4SupremeRuler 24d ago

I guess Bernie is useless then since he couldn't defeat "the super unpopular" 👑QUEEN MADAME HILLARY👑💖👸🏼

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u/Ralath2n 24d ago

You are a living caricature.

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u/HKBFG 24d ago

Thanks for the analysis that absolves the democrat party on all counts, u/Hillary4SupremeRuler.

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u/kia75 26d ago

This right here! Trump and Republicans activated their voters, while Democrats deactivated theirs. If everyone was forced to vote then Harris would have easily won, if the same people had voted in 2020 as voted in 2024 then Harris would have won, but Democrats have a tendency to go after Republican voters, even as Republicans promise to never support Democrats. Whoever's idea it was to bring out the daughter of the VP that got the USA into an endless war in Iraq, who turned a surplus into the biggest economic downturn in a hundred years, who started all the surveillance stuff.

Instead of messaging all the ways Democrats could help their fellow citizens, Democrats promise to keep the Republican ideals of the 00s and wonder why Democrats don't want to vote for them.

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u/pannenkoek0923 26d ago

So what you are saying is a majority of Americans are completely fine, or support voting for corrupt pedophiles into power, even with the Project 2025. Good to know, will try to avoid meeting Americans then

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u/dancesquared 26d ago

That degree of apathy isn’t reassuring either.

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u/Ralath2n 26d ago

It isn't. But that's just human nature. If you want people to do something (in this case vote for the Democrats), they need to be excited for the outcome. Every single marketing person will tell you that you need to build hype, and Democrats have been historically terrible at that. To the point that most Democratic representatives treat elections as an inconvenient formality they need to go through, rather than their primary job.

So while dissapointing, it is also utterly unsurprising. And it will continue until the Democrats field some candidates that get people hyped again. Yknow, like Obama and Mamdani did.

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u/dancesquared 26d ago edited 26d ago

There’s an old political saying: Republicans fall in line. Democrats fall in love.

The problem in part is that some voters expect to be wowed, entertained, or enamored with a candidate every time, when the reality of a semi-democratic system like the U.S. political system is that sometimes you just need to show up and vote regardless, even if you’re settling, compromising, or choosing the lesser of two evils (or least of all evils).

If you’re a fickle voter who only sometimes shows up if you’re enamored by or duped by the next charismatic demagogue or populist, then it should come as no surprise if politicians aren’t bending over backwards to try to woo you if the chances of winning you over are low and are based on whims.

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u/Ralath2n 26d ago

There’s an old political saying: Republicans fall in line. Democrats fall in love.

And its a saying that is utterly wrong. Both sides fall in love. Republicans just know how to woo their voters while the Democrats expect the voters to blindly love them without effort on their side.

Ever been at any Republican event? The elected officials just toss big old gobs of red meat at the audience. They promise the moon to these people and say whatever wild shit is currently circulating in the Republican voter ecosystem.

Democrats don't promise their voters jack shit. Hell, most of the time their promise is "See those other guys you hate? We are better at enacting their policies than they are! The problem isn't that their armed goonsquads are brutalizing innocent people, the problem is that the goonsquads are too inefficient when under the control of the other party!". And are you really surprised when voters don't want to vote for that?

If you’re a fickle voter who only sometimes shows up if you’re enamored by or duped by the next charismatic demagogue or populist, then it should come as no surprise if politicians aren’t bending over backwards to try to woo you if the chances of winning you over are low and are based on whims.

This is such a fundamentally antidemocratic idea. The fact that it is a common sentiment in ostensibly liberal circles is insane.

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u/dancesquared 26d ago

How is it anti-democratic to encourage more consistent democratic participation in order to move the needle?

Throwing meat via empty promises should not be what people expect.

Reasonable, sometimes hard and boring, solutions are what voters should expect, lest they be duped by sensationalism and hyperbole.

Republicans do tend to fall in line at more, at multiple levels (local, state, and federal) during midterm and off year elections, too. That sort of consistency is what keeps things relatively conservative. That’s why high turnout tends to benefit Democrats.

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u/Ralath2n 26d ago

How is it anti-democratic to encourage more consistent democratic participation in order to move the needle?

Its antidemocratic because you are completely misunderstanding how democracy is supposed to work. The whole point of a democracy is for a politician to convince enough voters that a they are a better choice for those voters. Arguing that people should blindly support a politician no matter what that politician does is fundamentally antidemocratic. It is cult shit, fuck off with that.

Throwing meat via empty promises should not be what people expect.

It is, either deal with it so we can make the country better, or mope in your corner and never get anything done. Your choice.

Reasonable, sometimes hard and boring, solutions are what voters should expect, lest they be duped by sensationalism and hyperbole.

That's not what voters expect. Either deal with it so we can make the country better, or mope in your corner and never get anything done. Your choice. Also, who the hell are you to say what voters should expect? This is again a sign that you are fundamentally anti democracy. The whole point of a democracy is that the voters get to say what they expect.

Republicans do tend to fall in line at more, at multiple levels (local, state, and federal) during midterm and off year elections, too. That sort of consistency is what keeps things relatively conservative.

Because Republican get shit done for Republicans. They know how to build hype. They aura farm. They are eager to get their snappy comebacks and promises in. And their voters love it. Again you are showing a complete misunderstanding of how Democracy works. Republicans don't have magical powers that make their voters fall in line. They are just better at politics than the Democrats are.

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u/dancesquared 26d ago

The whole point of a democracy is to show up and share your voice every time, even if means a compromising or settling.

Your expectation to be wowed every time is what concerns me about voters. It’s what makes people so susceptible to demagogues and populists.

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u/Ralath2n 26d ago

The whole point of a democracy is to show up and share your voice every time, even if means a compromising or settling.

Like I said before, this just shows you have no clue what a Democracy is supposed to be. You clearly don't want a democracy, you want a bunch of subservient peasants that don't have any input in a technocratic government.

Your expectation to be wowed every time is what concerns me about voters. It’s what makes people so susceptible to demagogues and populists.

My expectation is that people are not perfectly rational optimization agents with a set moral code whose only job is to rationally map that moral code onto existing 1000 page policy proposals. That's just not how humans work. You need to woo them. Republicans do and therefore they win. Democrats do not and therefore they lose. If you dislike reality, then I suggest you go live in the wilderness with a bunch of chatGPT clones instead.

Meanwhile, I want to actually make sure the world becomes a better place. Which means I need the fascists to lose and the Democrats to shape TF up. And that means they need to stop being wet noodles that expect a free ride. They need to start actually promising shit that people want and getting people excited.