Last generation: Climate activists now want to go to the European Parliament

The protest group Last Generation wants to run in the 2024 European elections. Spokeswoman Carla Hinrichs announced this on Wednesday. “Now we want to bring our resistance from the streets into parliament,” said Hinrichs in an online conference. The group stands for those who don’t mince words. Now it’s time to shake up the EU Parliament. “The party system is failing in the current multiple crises,” the group explains its plan in a press release.

Henning Jeschke, one of the founders of Last Generation, added that it was very close for the intended candidacy for the European elections in June. Many would have said that it couldn’t work anymore. But in the European elections, a vote share of 0.5 percent is enough to win a seat, which is around 250,000 votes.

Last generation looking for donations

Now there is initially a “community challenge”: an attempt is being made to find 100 volunteers for the campaign within a week and to collect 50,000 euros, said Jeschke. They will then begin collecting the necessary 4,500 signatures. A political association has already been founded for the candidacy. Jeschke also named two possible top candidates: Lina Johnsen from Leipzig and Theo Schnarr from Greifswald.

The group, founded in 2021 after a hunger strike, had mainly organized road blockades with glued activists for two years as a protest against what they considered to be too slow a climate policy. She recently announced that she would forego this form of protest.

“We, as the last generation, have now spent two years doing the job in society that nobody actually wants to do: we were the messengers of bad news,” said Hinrichs. But the group is also “the messenger that there can be a better world.”

Jeschke said: “In the end it’s very clear: you can close everything on the streets really wildly, block it, a lot of people go there, and people stop their work and everything – in the end you need a confronting power in parliament too.” Of course there is concern about “decline through the institutions”. But running yourself is better than “secretly voting for the Greens.” Jeschke accused this of “compromise addiction”. Demonstrations and civil disobedience should continue.

There is no threshold clause in Germany for this European election. In 2011, the Federal Constitutional Court initially overturned a five percent hurdle, and later also a three percent hurdle. An electoral law reform from 2022 stipulates that a threshold clause will be reintroduced in future elections in large member states such as Germany.