The Fridays for Future movement calls for rapid action for climate protection - that's why many people in Bavaria took to the streets on Friday.
It was the first major climate strike of the school year.
The protest in Munich exceeded expectations.
In Bavaria, thousands of people took to the streets on Friday for more climate protection. According to the police, around 12,000 participants attended the Fridays for Future protest in Munich alone. The organizers even spoke of 29,000. Originally, Fridays had only expected about 5000 participants in Munich for Future.
"We are a lot more than we expected," said the organizer's spokeswoman, Cosima Schaaf. Be pleasantly surprised. People wanted to draw attention to the topic again before the federal election on Sunday. Although the young people took the upcoming general election on Sunday as an occasion for their protest - the first on such a large scale this school year - they made it clear at the same time that they would not give up in the future either. "As long as we are deprived of our right to a future worth living by politicians, thousands of us will take to the streets and demand just that," said Eva Metz, also spokeswoman for Fridays for Future in Munich.
According to experts, the demonstrations are unlikely to have a short-term influence on the voting decision.
However, constant dripping wears away the stone.
“More people than ever think about the climate before an election,” says Arndt Leininger, political scientist at the Technical University in Chemnitz.
At the same time, he emphasizes that this cannot automatically be translated into votes.
Nevertheless, if a topic is perceived as important, experience has shown that the party that is considered to have the greatest competence on this question benefits.
These are clearly the Greens, says Leininger.
The party has recently lost a few points.
“As of now, it still amounts to a doubling of the 2017 result.” The Greens won 8.9 percent in the election four years ago.
Even Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze admits that Fridays for Future has “already achieved more” than “many of the young activists probably believe”. Much of what her party SPD has achieved in this legislative period would not have been possible “without this social support”, said the dpa minister. Climate protection is now for the first time a "top election campaign topic".
Demonstrations also took place on Friday in several other cities in the Free State and in the rest of Germany.
According to the police, 21,000 people were on the streets in Hambrug, and according to a police spokesman in Berlin, the number of participants was in the mid five-digit range.
“Fridays for Future” itself spoke to the great applause of the participants from 100,000 demonstrators - one of them was the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the initiator of the worldwide movement.
In the other Bavarian cities, the figures from Munich or even Berlin were far from being matched.
In Nuremberg the police reported 1900 participants in a protest march, in Regensburg there were more than 1000 men and women, and in Würzburg the number was given as around 600.