Two days before the recent German election, crowds gathered in cities across the country, demanding serious action on climate change. After catastrophic floods this summer, and protests from school climate strikers and anti-coal activists in recent years, climate breakdown overtook COVID as the issue of most concern to German voters, according to pollsters tracking attitudes in the run-up to the vote.
Earlier this year, Germany’s constitutional court found that the country’s climate targets weren’t ambitious enough, forcing Angela Merkel’s government to adopt stricter climate targets for 2030, and neutrality by 2045. The case, brought by young climate activists, is just one way that the Fridays for the Future movement, and those around it, have transformed German politics.
As one journalist covering the election told me, you used to have to look hard for discussion of climate policy in Germany. This time, it was a central feature of almost every party’s manifesto and a keystone in the press coverage of the vote.
