"Surprised when he actually did it"

Fridays for Future activist Luisa Neubauer is not exactly known for her warm words about the Chancellor. However, his appearance at the climate conference was "really important". She also sees Scholz's call for an exit from fossil fuels as a success in its own right. Now the traffic light needs "an announcement".

At first glance, it looks rather sad: A good 16 activists are standing in the scorching sun, holding up homemade signs. At least as many journalists are gathered in front of them. They are all blocking the entrance to the Singapore pavilion, which has nothing to do with the whole thing. A desperate press representative asks the cameramen present to keep the flag out of the picture. But there is no way around it: This is the only place the activists are allowed to demonstrate at all. There is not much left of the big Fridays for Future protest marches at this climate conference.

The United Nations has strict rules: Every demonstration must be registered and precisely coordinated. And yet Luisa Neubauer is convinced that her presence will make a difference: "We can exert pressure and we can also achieve success," she says in an interview with RTL and ntv. The most controversial point at this climate conference is the question of whether the global community can agree on a phase-out of fossil fuels. Even for Germany, this formulation is not obvious, says Neubauer. And that's where she comes in: "We have now been able to talk to Mr. Scholz personally about this and explicitly asked him (...) to commit to a global phase-out of fossil fuels. And I would say he was almost surprised when he actually did that."

The Chancellor had spoken out on the big stage in favor of a phase-out. This would now have to be followed by action, but the announcement was "really important".

Rift runs through Fridays for Future

Parallel to the small protest action, significantly more people wearing Palestinian scarves gather at the entrance to the climate conference, attracting a lot of media attention. They read out the names and ages of the Palestinian fatalities in Gaza. The Israeli victims are not mentioned. This is another reason why the Fridays for Future protest action is so much smaller than usual. The German group has distanced itself from Fridays for Future International because of its sometimes anti-Semitic statements. International cooperation is now only limited. "What has just started to falter, you can say that, is a shared history and the identity behind it," said Neubauer. They now want to take two months to think about how to move forward.

"I would say that I personally underestimated how controversial things are that were set in my understanding of values and in our understanding of values in Germany," says Neubauer. At the same time, the German section of Fridays for Future has also been actively campaigning against anti-Semitism in Germany for two years. The group is therefore not completely naive and blind, but has prepared itself accordingly. "And that is also the reason why we can be here now as a German movement," says Neubauer. "We are here at the climate conference, at the place where groundbreaking decisions are being made that affect everyone in the world. And we can do this because we have backing, because we are not falling apart at home, as is the case with the German government, for example."

"We are already going into debt every day"

Germany is presenting itself as a pioneer in climate protection at the climate conference. At home, the Federal Constitutional Court's ruling on the debt brake is shaking the German government's climate policy one by one. We can now see that the promise of "a little bit of climate protection and a little bit of everything else" is not working, said Neubauer. This also means that there is a lot to do for Fridays for Future: "A large part of this will certainly be the debt issue." There needs to be a major shift in political thinking, said Neubauer.

Germany must recognize the reality. "We are already in debt every day as a federal republic. We are indebted to the foundations of life, we are indebted to the younger generations, to the global South and to the future," said Neubauer. This indebtedness takes place every day that the climate targets are not met and no investment is made in restructuring the economy.

The activist hardly believes that the current coalition government will do more to protect the climate. As long as this coalition lies to itself and believes that there is a basis for work that is clearly not there, she believes it is naive to believe that this country can really move forward, said Neubauer. The traffic lights had built a fairytale house out of an apparent unity that would not exist when the going got tough. "And in this sense, I think the Chancellor would be very, very well advised to think about it: What are you doing politics for and where do you perhaps need to make an announcement?"