Fridays for Future has lost popularity, to the inertia after the pandemic, to more radical climate protection groups – but also to parties. Some of those who spent many Fridays on the streets to demonstrate for a more ambitious climate policy are now working on Fridays not only on demands, but on implementing them. Also on the other days of the week, of course. Walking through the committees, institutions and parliaments, in parties and in politics in general, takes time. It is not only the Greens who benefit from this ecological makeover. Protest-tested climate protectors now even exist in the Union.
Lukas Fuhr
Editor in politics.
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Lorenz Hemicker
Editor in politics
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The assumption that the paths of activists of the climate movement only lead in the direction of left-of-center parties has long since ceased to be true. In the CDU, CSU and their joint youth organization, there are now a number of young people who were or still are part of Fridays for Future. Their motives are anything but uniform.
Eline Laure van Gool, who joined the Junge Union in the summer of 2020, was initially enthusiastic about the "élan of our generation", which is still symbolized by Greta Thunberg for the 20-year-old Wiesbaden law student. She joined in the demonstration, got involved. But the actions of more radical parts of the movement, she says during a conversation in a café in the city center of the Hessian state capital, were not compatible with her image of society. At the end of 2021, she stopped participating in Fridays for Future.
Then it became too much with the critique of capitalism
Van Gool represents a generation of young Christian Democrats who no longer want to be pigeonholed. "Conservative, but not backward-looking," she characterizes herself. On her Instagram account, she presents her life between university, union and urban life in pretty tiles, just as many young people do today; Van Gool presents herself as a young woman at the height of her time, who sees no contradiction in fighting against global warming while at the same time controlling immigration and considering video surveillance to be "very useful".
Van Gool has no illusions about the reservations that still exist in the ranks of the Junge Union on the subject of global warming. Climate protection is "occupied on the left," she says. The youth organization, on the other hand, is still regarded as a rather conservative bunch in its breadth. There is a concern that the topic "cannot be authentically embodied". Van Gool sees things differently. "We have no choice at all," she says. The student, who is now district manager of the JU Wiesbaden, sounds a little like the activist she was before.
Nevertheless, she has withdrawn from the "Climate Union", which wants to strengthen the issue within the Union. Too left-wing, too much self-portrayal of individuals, no countable results, this is how her criticism can be summarized – with which she is not alone in the youth organization. As far as the strategic orientation in climate policy is concerned, van Gool sees himself in line with JU chairman Johannes Winkel, for whom climate neutrality is only desirable under the premise if Germany is retained as an industrial location. Winkel therefore also argues for the continued operation of nuclear power plants.