The climate crisis cannot be overcome with individual action - the speaker from Fridays for Future is certain of that.
"Whether we buy bamboo toothbrushes as individuals is irrelevant," says the young woman on the truck in front of the Alte Oper.
The small crosses on the ballot paper have a similarly limited effect as bamboo toothbrushes.
Only a system change, i.e. the abolition of capitalism, will really help.
But that can be done “not in the Bundestag or in the supermarket, but only on the street”.
“Brave protest doesn't do anything.” The fact that something is illegal does not mean that it is wrong, that something is legal does not mean that it is right.
Applause breaks out on the Opernplatz, which is filled to the brim.
Matthias Trautsch
Coordination of the Rhine-Main report.
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Later on Friday, some activists will turn words into action. Following the Fridays for Future demonstration, which begins on Opernplatz and ends with a rally on the Römerberg, climate protection activists occupy a small forest in the east of Frankfurt. They want to prevent the planned clearing for the expansion of the A66 and the construction of the Riederwald tunnel. For the autobahn, two kilometers of valuable trees, species-rich wetlands and tree-lined avenues would be destroyed in the Fechenheimer Wald, Erlenbruch and Teufelsbruch, according to the campaign “Teufelsbruch remains!”.
The action follows the logic of the speeches that were given three hours earlier on Opernplatz. A Zapatista group laments that animals and plants are being wiped out and people are being subjugated around the world. “There is a culprit for this destruction - this culprit has a name: It is the capitalist system.” The speaker from Fridays for Future, who appears afterwards, ties in seamlessly. Since the beginning of industrialization, all values have been subordinated to the primacy of growth. The principle of competition divides people into exploiters and exploited. The police, whose job it is to protect capital, also serve this system. A left slide in the federal election would be “the best that could happen”, but even a red-red-green coalition would not bring about an end to the capitalist and “fascist” system.
"Make the election to the climate election"
Several posters can be seen at the demonstration that speak a similar language.
“For life, against capitalism” is written on a meter-long banner that young people put up behind the truck at the head of the march.
An elderly man with a long gray beard holds up a sign that reads “Bigwigs and capital drive out”.
A young woman with reddish curls wrote “Save the climate” and “Fight capitalism” on a cardboard box.
According to Fridays for Future, 19,000 people are taking part in the Frankfurt edition of the “climate strike”, the police say several thousand participants. Supporters of the CDU candidate for chancellor cannot be found in the demonstration. A young man carries a sign that reads: “Coal sucks. Armin too. ”A 25-year-old student of social work, who pushes her bicycle next to her, wrote on a piece of cardboard“ Make the election to the climate election ”and crossed out the abbreviation CDU underneath. You hope for red-red-green, she says. She finds the rhetoric of some activists exaggerated, but criticism of capitalism is necessary and important.
On the other hand, some demonstrators clearly distance themselves from anti-capitalist demands.
An eighteen-year-old who came to Frankfurt with a group of schoolchildren from Dietzenbach says that he will vote for the Greens in the federal election because of climate policy, but that he is basically “not very leftist”.
“The call for street fighting does not do what I imagine.” A classmate in a white hoodie also claims to vote for the Greens.
Some of the speeches at the Fridays for Future demonstration are too undifferentiated for him.
A lot of different things would be “packed together” under the heading of climate protection.
To describe the police as aiding a fascist system, he considers, for example, to be quite inappropriate.