Last year, Katharina Kewitz, a 26-year-old from Lübeck, northern Germany, joined fellow climate activists for a meeting with bus drivers. She and her peers sought to build an alliance between those seeking climate justice and the public transport unions pushing for better working conditions. It was part of the larger campaign #WirFahrenZusammen (We Are Driving Together) to broaden the coalition for climate action – and to help remake Germany’s climate movement for the current political moment.

In 2019, millions of people joined protests in hundreds of cities across Germany and around the world as part of Fridays For Future (FFF), the student-led climate strikes inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The strikes coincided with, and likely contributed to, a rise in popularity for Green parties across Europe, including in Germany. In 2021, Germany’s Greens had their best electoral showing ever and joined the three-party coalition government that promised to make climate a priority.

What a difference a few years make. Ahead of the snap federal elections on 23 February, inflation, immigration and the rise of the far right dominate political and media discourse. The likely next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, has insisted the economy will come before climate policies. Populist forces, including far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and radical-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), have weaponised climate policies as a cudgel against a political establishment they frame as out-of-touch. Meanwhile, many activists who championed the Greens’ rise feel betrayed by the lack of climate progress.

The force and the visibility of Germany’s climate movement, often defined by Fridays For Future, has likewise faded. The students who first walked out of class on Fridays are now adults facing a post-pandemic world with overlapping crises, wars, and geopolitical tensions.

“This moment does feel different, and it does feel like climate has very much fallen down on the political agenda,” said Helena Marschall, a 22-year-old climate activist and organiser with Fridays For Future in Germany. “There’s definitely been easier times to be a climate activist in this country,” Marschall added.

That is why some are seeking new places and partners, like labour unions, to build momentum for climate action in a transformed political landscape. It is also what motivated Kewitz to spend a day in the bus drivers’ break room in Lübeck answering and asking questions.

Kewitz said many drivers were initially sceptical of climate action. Already struggling with rising costs, they worried it would make their lives more expensive. They saw the activists as disruptive, the people who glued themselves to the road and made the job of a bus driver harder – even though Kewitz and most activists with Fridays For Future never participated in such protests.

“The difference in this campaign is that we as climate activists were really starting to make the working class our ally, and we talked to them about common goals and about how better working conditions and investments in public transport would benefit both the climate and the workers and social justice,” Kewitz said. “And then in the end, we also did strike together.” After, Kewitz said, some bus drivers began calling themselves climate activists.

Current and former activists in Germany, including those who protested or organised with Fridays For Future, say they are still trying to figure out the exact formula or approach to continue the climate fight, and tensions persist around both messaging and strategy. Many also mention a responsibility to oppose the far right, which they see as threatening the democratic and civil spaces that made Germany’s climate movement a success. All consider climate action to be as urgent as ever, even as they recognise what worked in the past – bringing thousands to the streets – may not be enough anymore.

However,  organising still matters. Ahead of the upcoming election, Fridays For Future will stage climate strikes in more than 100 German cities, pushing to get climate back on the agenda. “We’re going to fight as hard as hell to make sure that we can still make progress in all kinds of areas,” Marschall said. “Even though it feels hard right now, we have made immense progress in six years.”

A “golden age” – until it wasn’t

Julia Horn, a 28-year-old climate justice advocate from Cologne, saw the strikes in 2018 and 2019 as the height of the climate movement. “The connection between people on the streets, and the demands from the streets, and actual changes in legislation and policy felt very tangible,” Horn said.

The strikes put pressure on the Angela Merkel-led German government as it formulated its climate plans and coincided with the electoral success of the Greens in the 2019 European elections, as well as in Germany’s 2021  federal vote. The climate movement was succeeding at the party level and within civil society. “In retrospect, a kind of golden age,” said Marco Bitschnau, a postdoctoral researcher who studies social movements at the Universität Konstanz.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which interrupted a movement built on in-person organising. The global political shocks that followed – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the cost of living and the energy crisis – overtook the climate emergency. The rise of the far-right AfD forced a redirection of activism – and organising infrastructure – from climate to pro-democracy demonstrations. Other political issues, most recently Israel’s war in Gaza, seeped into groups like Fridays For Future and fragmented the movement.

Germany’s youth climate movement grew up just as Germany outgrew the climate movement.

Additionally, other climate groups emerged, most notably the Letzte Generation (Last Generation). Their more radical tactics – such as activists glueing themselves to streets or spray-painting the Brandenburg Gate – attracted attention and then backlash. Though these events made Fridays For Future organisers look far more moderate – the “good students”, as they were called – the public debate often focused on the extreme methods of Letzte Generation activists rather than the demands around climate action.

Activists of all types also saw the limitations of their protests. The fact that the movement coincided with the so-called “Green Wave” did not translate into the rapid or bold political action that many were seeking. “A lot of young people who got involved now feel disappointed and have the feeling it’s not that easy to change things, and the politicians won’t really hear what we say,” said Jonathan Deisler, a 23-year-old from Berlin and a board member of environmental youth organisation BUNDjugend “We’re millions on the street, and even that isn’t enough to change something.”

And a lot of the students who had walked out of class on Fridays in 2018 or 2019 are no longer students. They now have to take care of rent, jobs, and groceries – priorities that compete with organising and protesting. Germany’s youth climate movement grew up just as Germany outgrew the climate movement.

“The very essence of momentum is that it cannot hold on forever,” Marschall says. “Momentum builds up and you bring a lot of people on the streets, and then, by necessity, momentum goes down again.”

A sign of the times

How to get that momentum back is the question facing Germany’s climate activists and civil society groups.

Many brought up the need to forge broader, more durable coalitions, such as those with labour unions.  This is partly a recognition that the climate emergency message is failing to resonate with a large part of the German public who may support pro-climate policies but are fearful of the costs and disruption to their lives. “In order to really build a majority of people wanting climate action, we really need to stop pitting the end of the world against the end of the month,” Kewitz said.

This has created a tension, especially for those who came up with Fridays For Future and sought to convince the public and politicians of the primacy of the climate threat to humanity. But others see it more pragmatically: they cannot solve the climate crisis without addressing these social issues.

“They’re talking more about democracy, about redistribution, about social justice, climate justice,” Christoph Leonard Hesse, head of LocalZero, a project working towards climate neutrality by 2035, said of Fridays For Future. “They’re going there slowly, but still they’re going there. This is probably how we can mobilise people that, with the climate issue, they’re not convinced.” Even Letzte Generation said late last year it was rebranding and that it would change its approach, focusing less on blockades and more on social issues.

Germany’s climate movement is shifting in response to these changes in German politics, also seeing such broader coalitions as an antidote to the rise of the far right. Ahead of the elections, the AfD is polling in second place just behind the CDU. Though all mainstream parties have ruled out  governing with the AfD, many see Germany’s far-right firewall crumbling. In late January, the CDU tabled a nonbinding motion in the German parliament, calling for stricter migration measures, which initially passed with the support of the AfD. (A second bill that would have become law failed.)

“If the far right governs and actually pushes political priorities, then climate is not even going to be on the agenda,” Horn, the climate activist, said. “There is a sense of having to put democracy, human rights, and these kinds of things as top of the priority list right now.”

The AfD, like other far-right movements globally, is also seeing surprising success with younger voters, especially young men. Exactly how durable this rightward shift is across democracies is still unknown, but many experts connect it with a broader disillusionment with the current status quo. Climate activists may also be frustrated with current leaders, but they still see democracy and civil action as the solution. They still seek to pressure the government and public institutions rather than destroy them.

Climate activists have already tapped into their strike networks to help organise pro-democracy demonstrations. “This is also an important but overlooked effect from the Fridays for Future protests that they created this protest infrastructure, which then these protests against the far right could build upon,” said Lennart Schürmann, a research fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, who has studied Germany’s climate movement.

And some see this broad pro-democratic coalition as a way to revitalise the climate fight. “There’s an opportunity. Because now the climate movement becomes an important ally in the broader alliance of the reasonable,” Hesse says. He views the “alliance of the reasonable” as everyone from the left to the centre who is motivated to block the AfD from power and to stop other parties from working with them. Because of this common goal, Hesse believes, the climate movement has a chance to reach people it was not able to reach previously. “There’s a chance that they can come out stronger again than before,” he argues.

Now, activists need to convince the public there is a way out of the crisis.

Past success and future uncertainty

German climate activists recognise that there is a lot of uncertainty – about the future of the movement, about how they will build a broad coalition to prioritise urgent and serious climate action, and about climate policy under Germany’s next government. The CDU has indicated it will roll back climate legislation passed by the previous government, including a law that set renewable energy standards for heating systems in new buildings. Instead, the party says it will centre carbon pricing as its main tool to fight warming. However, the CDU will need to implement climate policy, as Germany’s commitment to reduce emissions by 55 per cent by 2030 is legally binding, and the country is not on track to hit that target. Merz may have to be the “climate chancellor” whether he likes it or not.

Many who joined the Fridays For Future strikes are no longer active in protests, but they’re working for civil society groups or established NGOs to keep pushing climate and environmental policies. They acknowledge setbacks, but they accept them as an integral part of the struggle for justice. “Political opinion is not a straight line,” says Magdalena Sedlmayr, a 23-year-old from Bonn who formerly organised for Fridays For Future.

Groups like Fridays For Future are in flux, but they remain a force. People are still protesting or finding new ways to advance their cause. “Quite often, movements appear, they are successful for a short time, and then they disappear because they do not reinvent themselves,” Schürmann, of Harvard, said. “But with the climate movement, that still exists after six years. Now, this is quite a success.”

According to Marschall, Fridays For Future sought in its early days to alarm people about the climate catastrophe. But that has changed because people are already alarmed. Now, activists like her need to convince the public there is a way out of the crisis.

In this fight, young people may be one of the most important audiences. Marschall says she believes what motivated early climate strikers was the sense that something that belonged to them – an inhabitable planet – was being taken away. “People who are eight, six, ten years younger than me, they don’t think they have a right to that anymore,” she notes. This generation only knows a world that is burning, alongside economic crisis and conflict. A sense of hopelessness may be shared across the political spectrum. A survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation of 16- to 30-year-olds in Germany found that about 40 per cent believed social conditions could not be changed, and one in two said they often felt “overwhelmed” by the world’s problems. At the same time, a third of those surveyed said they would like to get more involved, a sign that climate strikes can recreate the movement’s energy, though perhaps in a different form.

“As a movement, our job is not to ride the wave of public discourse. It’s to build public discourse,” Marschall said. “If we want climate to rise higher on the agenda again sometime in the future, then that’s not going to happen on its own – that’s going to happen because people are pushing for that to happen.”

Or as Diesler, of BUNDjugend, put it: “There’s no one else who will do it. So we have to do it.”