Up to two months preventive detention for the “last generation”: climate activists are simply repeat offenders

Created: 11/17/2022, 6:00 p.m

By: Georg Anastasiadis

Climate protests (like here in Munich) are now increasingly having legal consequences.

Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis comments on the question of how radical the protest threatens to become.

© Lennart Preiss/dpa/Klaus Haag

The President for the Protection of the Constitution does not yet classify radical climate protesters as extremists.

However, the activists of the "Last Generation" are not martyrs, but repeat offenders.

A commentary by Georg Anastasiadis.

The President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, sees the activists of the “Last Generation” group as criminals, but not extremists.

Of course, the constitutional guardian added an important caveat to his assessment: "At least at present" the group is not directed against the free-democratic basic order.

But the question of whether a hard core of the doomsday sect is mutating into a climate RAF and using the alleged climate-related "mass death" as a pretext to resort to new forms of violence against the allegedly inactive state cannot be answered seriously by Haldenwang today.

Criminal offenses in climate protests: the public should not fall for pity

There are first signs of this – such as the willingness, documented in the case of a cyclist who died in Berlin, to accept collateral victims if necessary (“shit happens”).

Or the attempt by some members of the “last generation” in Bavaria to stylize themselves as victims of excessive state violence, including hunger strikes.

In Bavaria, people can be taken into "preventive custody" for up to two months after a judicial assessment if it can be assumed that they will commit further crimes.

The original RAF also once invoked its right to resist an alleged police state, and it became more and more radical in the process.

The public, but especially the Greens, who waver in their assessment of the self-proclaimed “last generation” and their actions, should not fall for the pity act: anyone who intentionally violates the law and announces that they will do so again the next day is indeed far from being a terrorist, but also not a martyr, just a repeat offender.