Activism: Hunger strike: Climate activist hospitalized

According to the campaign “Starve until you’re honest”, a participant in the climate hunger strike in Berlin has been hospitalized. 49-year-old Wolfgang Metzeler-Kick was taken to the Bundeswehr hospital, the campaign said. He has been on hunger strike for 89 days, and his health was recently classified as acutely life-threatening by a team of doctors.

Several activists from the campaign have been on hunger strike in Berlin for weeks and some are in serious health problems. They are demanding a government statement from Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD). In it, the Chancellor is expected to say, among other things, that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already too high and that there is no CO2 budget left.

The campaign also distributed quotes from Metzeler-Kick that had been prepared in case he was admitted to hospital. “Obviously the government is more willing to let us starving people die than to state scientific facts,” he criticised, among other things. The hunger strikers and their supporters called for non-violent protests.

Scholz wants hunger strike to be stopped

The Chancellor recently appealed to the participants of the climate hunger strike to call off their action. That was his wish, said the SPD politician at a public discussion organized by the “Thüringer Allgemeine”. Scholz did not specifically respond to the activists’ demands.

The activists live in a tent camp at the Federal Ministry of Economics. Metzeler-Kick from Munich began its action on March 7, the others followed one after the other.