This was quite surprising at the time, as they initially mobilized over other issues such as education. Within a few months, though, the movement had spread widely and further groups such as Parents for Future, Scientists for Future and Extinction Rebellion were born.
The Covid-19 pandemic - and the social distancing measures taken to contain it - brought public gatherings to a sudden halt. How have the climate change movements reacted to this?
Sabrina Zajak
The pandemic has halted nearly all social interactions and, of course, demonstrations have been severely restricted. Movements have responded to these challenges in different ways: some, including migrant advocacy groups, have taken legal action to claim the right of assembly and organize small demonstrations that have respected social distancing guidelines. Fridays for Future was able to build upon an already highly developed digital infrastructure, which it had established through networking across Germany and Europe. They organized alternative educational forums, addressed the effects of the pandemic on their movement through the hashtag #WirBildenZukunft (We Shape the Future) and updated their demands accordingly. They also moved into hybrid forms of protest, which combine both online and offline activity. For example, they attracted a lot of attention from their protest in front of the Bundestag in April 2020, symbolically signaling the scale of their movement with more than 10,000 banners while simultaneously organizing an online strike. Starting in summer 2020, Fridays for Future joined forces with various other anti-racist and pro-migrant movements such as Black Lives Matter and Unteilbar and organized their own large in-person demonstrations, although again socially distanced. This was particularly important in order to distance themselves from the growing number of anti-lockdown protests.
Yann Le Lann
In France, mass demonstrations by climate protestors began several months earlier than in Germany. They also stopped earlier than the German protests. After the September 2019 clashes between protestors and the police, there have been no further mass demonstrations.
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