With demonstrations, rallies and blockades, Fridays for Future protested against the banks in Frankfurt on Friday.

Local groups from all over Germany took part in the “central climate strike”.

The police counted almost 5,000, the organizers reported around 15,000 participants.

So many people had not come together for a demonstration by the climate movement since February 2020, i.e. since the beginning of the corona pandemic.

The criticism was directed not only at the address of the Frankfurt-based financial institutions, such as Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, but also against the capitalist economic system in general, which many participants believe is responsible for the global crisis.

"Human survival depends on the destruction of capitalism," said one speaker.

Matthias Trautsch

Coordination of the Rhine-Main report.

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The actions began in the early afternoon with star marches from six different locations in the city, including the European Central Bank.

At around 3 p.m. the first protest marches reached Opernplatz, the location of the main rally.

Many participants had spent the night in the “climate camp” at the Weseler shipyard.

Others came straight from their hometowns - for example a group from Konstanz, to which 17-year-old Frida Mühlhoff belongs.

In their opinion, the strong participation in the protest despite the summer vacation, corona and train strike is also due to the fact that the topic of climate protection has become very publicized by the floods and forest fires in recent weeks.

"People see: if that happens in the Ahr Valley, it can happen anywhere."

"Something has to change in the financial sector"

The seventeen-year-old thinks that the banks are the focus of the climate protest.

The fact that society is no longer doing anything to protect the climate is a “collective failure of industry, politics and the financial world”, but it is the banks that finance climate-damaging companies.

There are calculations according to which three quarters of the "budget" that would have to be adhered to in order to achieve the 1.5 degree target in Paris would be used up just because of the financing commitments already made, for example for the construction of coal-fired power plants.

"That is why it is absolutely clear that something has to change in the financial sector, otherwise we can bend the climate targets."

Kathrin Petz from the Urgewald organization makes a similar statement as a speaker on the stage. The fact that the German banks claimed that they were financing the transformation of the economy from fossil to renewable energy sources was a mistake. Rather, they continued to support companies that damaged the climate, for example through the mining and burning of lignite, and prevented stricter environmental protection regulations. "The RWEs of this world are the biggest climate killers." The financial sector should no longer make money available to such companies. "Ten years ago you could still have helped with a transformation, now only exclusion is enough."

In other countries, the banks have already started to act in this way, says Petz.

She cites the major Italian bank Unicredit and the French cooperative bank Crédit Mutuel as examples.

“We have to turn off the money faucet for the fossil fuel companies.” Consumers who wanted to exert pressure themselves could also use World Savings Day at the end of October as an opportunity, which was finally introduced by the banks themselves.

Climate change and genocide

Most of the activists on Opernplatz are schoolchildren and young adults, but there are also many older people. In addition to Fridays before Future, the organizations include Greenpeace. Seebrücke, Ende Ende and the Verdi youth represented. Left-wing extremists are also there, for example the communist Free German Youth (FDJ). On her poster it says: "With a capitalist mode of production there is no environmental protection."

A speaker from the Zapatista Ya-Basta network is also radical. She relates climate change to genocide and other crimes. “A system is responsible for this pain - capitalism.” Frankfurt is a central place from which the destruction of nature and the murder of people are organized. “This is where the people in charge sit.” She gets a big applause from the audience. In the speaking choir, listeners chant: "High international solidarity."