In September 2019, 1.4 million German residents responded to the call of the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement and took to the streets and squares to demonstrate for immediate policies to address the climate crisis. It was a record attendance, which many noted would be hard to beat. But no one imagined that this movement five years later will have lost so much momentum. And this, despite the fact that major disasters, which are now largely attributed to climate change, are becoming more frequent, with the most recent example being the major catastrophic floods that hit southern Germany again this year.

Frustration or fatigue?

What could possibly be happening? Frustrated at not reaching goals? Fatigue? Because of course no one can claim that the cries of anguish of that time have been transformed into effective policies. This question also occupied the activist and journalist Manuel Grebenjak in his very recent book entitled “Turning Points. Strategies in the ecosystem of the climate movement’ (Kipppunkte. Strategien im Ökosystem der Klimabewegung).

In the preface the author observes the lack of dynamics for mobilization and social support, lack of orientation within the movement and the influence of other crises that overshadow what is happening in the environment. His sober assessment is that “right now it doesn’t look like the movement will be able to return to its pre-pandemic strength any time soon.” It essentially remains in a state of hibernation.

Pandemic and other demons

The truth is that the pandemic and the lockdowns came at the worst time for the movement. On the other hand, however, scientists have not tired of pointing out that the pandemics of the future, which will largely come from the climate crisis, can be much worse. But societies faced with repeated shocks, as war and the energy crisis followed with precision and inflation, somewhere lost their bearings. This overall affected the colorful “ecosystem” of environmental movements, which anyway often started from different starting points, set different immediate goals, and often even found themselves quarreling with each other, both over methods and priorities.

A dose of frustration about the “elusive goals” cannot be ignored, which has to some extent to do with the transformation of the Greens into a centrist party of “realists”, which has taken a definitive divorce from actions of a cinematic nature and activism. The Greens of the past were much closer to such movements, regardless of whether they could not always influence them, but they certainly contributed to taking a more concrete form actions that might start spontaneously and not always purposefully.

Especially the very young in terms of the members of the FFF movement, faced very early problems of orientation, political expression of some of its raw positions and showed that it was running out of strength. After all, in such movements spontaneity, immediacy, creative “disorganization” may at first appear as advantages, but gradually turn into a brake.

Determined, but alone

Some other kinetic organizations of somewhat older youth, mainly students who chose more extreme forms of protest, made their presence felt and harassed the security authorities, but were unable to achieve any of their goals. A typical example is “Extinction Rebellion” (XR), which tried to block the extraction of fossil fuels with sit-ins and militant protests. “In its five years of existence, the movement has not achieved its goals,” admit activists Judith Pape and Anna Kondriner in the book. And they continue: “In none of the countries where XR operates has it been possible to exert enough pressure to force the government to act.”

A similar problem has to be faced by the newest “Letzte Generation”. She may have gained a lot of publicity for her actions – chaining up factories, blocking roads by sticking hands to the asphalt, throwing paint on works of art – but the focus has been precisely on her methods, not her demands. And the disruption she often caused in the daily lives of Germans ultimately resulted in 85% of citizens finding her annoying and rejecting her methods as “off the mark”. From October 2019 to June 2023, public support for the climate movement halved overall, to 34%, Grebenjak notes.

This does not mean that awareness of the problem is absent. It’s just that other ways of acting and, above all, achieving goals will have to be found. This is also the reason why, as noted by many sociologists and political scientists who deal with the issue, under the apparently quiet surface there is an effervescence and it will be interesting to see how and in what way it will emerge at some point.