Despite the somewhat tempered enthusiasm for the German climate protests of Fridays for Future, some 75,000 people turned up on Friday for 100 rallies organized at various locations across the country.
“Today, tens of thousands of us took to the streets and showed that people do not want to remain passive in the face of the escalating climate crisis as long as the German government is unable to implement concepts for a socially just climate policy,” said Annika Rittmann of Fridays for Future Germany.
Official police figures on the total number of participants were initially not available.
Children, young people and adults took to the streets in dozens of cities, including Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Hanover.
According to the organizers and the police, several thousand people demonstrated in the German capital. The organizers had previously expected 5,000 people.
The protesters carried posters with slogans such as “Stop climate change” and “Don’t leave the earth in the oven too long or it will burn!”
Munich police estimated the number of participants at around 2,600. The demonstrators used the slogan “If nothing changes, everything changes” to express their frustration.
According to police, there were about 1,000 demonstrators in Hanover, while about 600 people took part in Bremen.
Demonstrations were also planned in about 20 cities in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Cologne, police reported that organizers had registered 3,500 participants for a protest march, while 600 showed up in Düsseldorf and 400 in Dortmund.
Protest Researcher: Protests Depend on Public Opinion
Before the start of the corona pandemic, in some cases hundreds of thousands of people in Germany took to the streets to campaign for climate protection.
Meanwhile, the climate movement has lost some of its momentum. In May, for example, around 1,000 people gathered for a rally in Hamburg, significantly fewer than the 15,000 that organizers had originally expected.
In Munich too, the number of attendees was around 2,000, considerably less than the 8,000 that the organizers had registered in advance.
According to Simon Teune, a protest researcher at the Free University of Berlin, it is not unusual for protest movements to experience varying levels of support. He says that protests are very dependent on the public mood.
The right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has been very successful in stimulating public debate in recent months, Teune explained. That explains why there is currently little room for the climate crisis, he added, even though it is still very much present.
Other crises have dampened enthusiasm for Germany’s Fridays for Future climate protests, spokeswoman Carla Reemtsma said earlier, explaining that the Friday protest was not expected to attract as many people as before.
Reemtsma told public radio station Deutschlandfunk that the climate movement is highly dependent on the political context.
“These are huge crises, whether it’s the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, and then inflation, the rising cost of living, the energy crisis, which of course upsets many, many people,” she said. The movement did not blame anyone for focusing on other issues at the moment.
“Politicians, regardless of the circumstances, are responsible for protecting our living conditions,” she stressed.
Movement founded by Swedish Greta Thunberg
Asked if the movement missed its figurehead Greta Thunberg, Reemtsma said: “The good thing is that we have been a very broadly supported movement from the beginning, and now we are active again in more than 110 cities, and we are taking to the streets. I think you see that we can protest very well even without her.”
Thunberg first went on strike for climate protection outside her school in Sweden in 2018, founding the Fridays for Future movement.
She recently received criticism for her statements about Israel, accusing the state of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The German branch of Fridays for Future has distanced itself from her statements.
