Our Best Chance to Save the Earth? Plan for a Planet-Wide Strike.

By Mike Hembury — SOAPBOX

Two days before the German elections, 100,000 people demonstrate in Berlin in response to a call by the youth-led organisation Fridays For Future (FFF). For Germany as a whole, the figure is around 600,000 people. Strikes and demonstrations take place at hundreds of different locations around the world, making this one of the biggest actions for climate justice since the first youth strike wave of 2019.

Among those participating in the German capital, school students are in the overwhelming majority. Yet there are also plenty of demonstrators from older generations — people who have taken the day or maybe just a few hours off work, called in sick or persuaded their workmates to come along to the demonstration. There is also significant participation by striking health care workers, with explicit calls to join the demo by their union (ver.di, the united service workers’ union) and the campaign to expropriate corporate landlords DWEnteignen.

Preparation for the strike among school students has clearly been good, in contrast to the noticeable lack of poster coverage and online agitation among the population at large. All the more surprising then the resonance the call for climate strike seems to have had.