People power grips Madagascar

The protests have been peaceful and good-natured

By the BBC's Alastair Leithead in Antananarivo, Madagascar

Every year in countries around the world people turn on their governments, using strikes and demonstrations to get their point across.

Ratsiraka is under pressure to resign

But rarely do those strikes last for weeks, the number of people on the street exceed half a million and the demonstrations remain peaceful and good hearted throughout.

Welcome to Madagascar, the world's fourth largest island, sometimes on the international agenda for its flora and fauna or perhaps even the odd eclipse, but now catapulted onto the international stage as a place where peaceful people decide enough is enough and they show it - en masse.

Optimists claimed a million, but even pessimists agreed on 500,000 protesters on the narrow, steep, winding roads of Antananarivo, the Malagasy capital.

And 500,000 is a lot of people.

Streets crowded

Independence Avenue in the centre of Tana, as it is known, is about 1.5 kilometres (one mile) long and about 150 metres wide, but for four hours a day it is packed with people.

The protests have been taking place for more than a week

Some sit in the middle of the avenue, umbrellas open to protect them from a harsh sun or the heavy monsoon rains.

Others join their workmates and whistle, dance, chant and march their way down the avenue, their placards an easy way of totting up just how many different companies are sticking to the general strike - more than a week after it was first called.

That one line of protesters can snake past the daily erected stage for four hours or more - and few people go through twice.

The focal point is the Place de 13 Mai, with its historical revolutionary undertones, but here in Madagascar everyone is becoming a revolutionary.

Show of strength

Wandering through the people making up that kind of display of mass action is a very strange, even inspiring experience.

The first question has got to be "are they right?"

But there are just so many of them - all with their flags, T-shirts, baseball caps all carrying the same face and screaming "Marc Ravalomanana for president".

A foreign journalist getting a feel for the place was right when I overheard him say "even Elvis would have been amazed to get this kind of reception".

But what of the future of the demonstrations? Can these go on indefinitely?

Election dispute

The incumbent President, Didier Ratsiraka, is keeping a very low profile and there is no dialogue between the two sides over the disputed election results.

Ravalomanana says he won last month's presidential elections

There's no doubt that the people's favourite won, by at least 200,000 votes, but whether he broke the 50% barrier and gained the absolute majority needed to assume the presidency without a second round of elections is debatable.

But the people of Tana, and in many other parts of rural Madagascar, have already decided what they want - change.

They are no strangers to mass protests in Madagascar - President Ratsiraka was ousted in a similar way in the early 1990s, only to return when the people's great hope ended in impeachment.

But this time they feel there is something different.

They have found their focus and people truly believe there is a challenger who can run the country - and run it better.

Finding allies of the president is hard work, but as the silence grows longer and the public protests grow larger, the more likely it becomes that the presidency will move on.