Gen Z Uprisings spell The End of the Useless Governments
- All Latin America, from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego.
- South East Asians Indonesia the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia
- African all over.
They are more educated have more access to information but still are ruled by an outdated old guard.
I lived in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil and West, East and Southern Africa. I know very well what useless governments are.
These useless governments that have hide behind post-independence nationalism have it coming.
South Africa useless government hides behind the Apartheid instead of a foreign colonial power.
The Contagious Gen Z Uprisings
It’s a good time to start paying attention to the youth-led protests that are spreading around the world and that have toppled governments.
By Katrin Bennhold
I’m the host of The World.
Oct. 19, 2025
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Protests in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, last week. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
What struck me when I first read about the Gen Z protests happening around the world was how familiar the protesters seemed. A phrase on a poster spotted during the protests in Nepal — “corruption is sus, stop ghosting democracy” — sounded like something my teenagers might say over dinner.
That’s not a coincidence. These protest movements, in part thanks to the ubiquity of online youth culture, have emerged in Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya and Peru. Protesters have toppled governments in Nepal and Madagascar. In Morocco, the protests are continuing.
Two of my colleagues have reported for extended periods on groups of Gen Z protesters. John Eligon embedded with the young people who drove Madagascar’s president from power. Hannah Beech spent time with protesters in Nepal in the wake of their 48-hour revolution. You can watch my conversation with Hannah below.
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What to Know About ‘Gen Z Protests’ Around the World
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Gen Z protests are raging against political establishments across the world, from Madagascar to Nepal. Katrin Bennhold and Hannah Beech, reporters for The New York Times, discuss what is causing these protests and why an anime-inspired symbol keeps appearing at demonstrations.CreditCredit...Juni Kriswanto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nepal and Madagascar are two very different countries. But the parallels between the two protest movements — what drove them, and what has happened since the surprise revolutions unseated two governments — speak to a paradox.
The young Gen Z revolutionaries have real power. But they don’t have the power to control what they’ve begun, or to ensure that the movements they started actually improve their lives.
Different countries, similar movements
The immediate triggers for each Gen Z movement have varied. In Nepal, it was an abrupt social media ban. In Madagascar, it was a failure to deliver water and electricity.
But both countries — like many seeing Gen Z protests — have young populations. The median age in Nepal is 28; in Madagascar, it’s 21. Both struggle with high youth unemployment. Graft and patronage are endemic.
So is social media.
These protests have spread through platforms that defy physical distance and turbocharge a shared language and culture.
“Even if you’re in a village, on a mountaintop or in a desert, young people are connected on TikTok and Discord,” Hannah said. “They use the same language and share the same memes.”
In Nepal, the protesters talked about drawing inspiration from demonstrations in Indonesia, she said. In Madagascar, John told me, the protesters drew inspiration from Nepal.
Can protests solve deep structural problems?
What Hannah and John also found were movements that quickly moved away from what the original protesters had envisioned.
In Madagascar, where the president fled and the military seized power, there are already signs that the Gen Z revolutionaries will not have the kind of influence on the next government they had imagined. The news that a former opposition leader and career politician was chosen as the next leader of the National Assembly was met with dismay among young people.
In Nepal, the young activists who were consulted by the interim prime minister in the immediate aftermath of the protests now say they have been frozen out.
In both countries, there’s also a much bigger concern: that whatever government materializes in the end can’t easily solve the many grievances young people have. As one Nepali protester who was almost shot during the demonstrations put it: What “if everything goes back to the same way, even after we lost our blood and fallen comrades? What if all this was a waste?”
Many of those grievances stem from deep structural problems common to many countries with young populations, according to Abigail Branford, a researcher at Oxford whose work focuses on Africa.
“Issues like youth unemployment would be very difficult for states to address even if there was a more concerted effort toward including young people in mainstream politics,” she said. “The economy just can’t absorb the number of young people entering the job market.”
When I first learned about these Gen Z movements, they made me think of the 1968 protests that erupted across Western Europe and the U.S., fueled by a youth bulge, rock ’n’ roll and rage against the policies of an older, more conservative political elite.
But I also thought about the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings in the 2010s in which young people were the vanguard. These also toppled governments but in most countries did not lead to either democratization or an improvement in young people’s prospects.
Young people are hungry for change. They have proved they have the power to bring about change. But what happens next? |
