Shortly before the general election, climate activists end their life-threatening hunger strike against the promise of a meeting with Olaf Scholz. The one-hour encounter escalated – obviously planned – to the big tribunal. The upcoming chancellor sees himself wrongly accused.
It takes less than ten minutes until Olaf Scholz has to be yelled at for the first time. A billion people on the run if the earth heats up even by two degrees! “We have to make ourselves aware of that and connect with it emotionally,” shouts the climate activist Henning Jeschke with audible despair in his voice. It is the desperation that many people do not feel this emotional connection to the same extent as he does; certainly not the man who is sitting with him on the podium: Olaf Scholz, Federal Minister of Finance and probably the next Federal Chancellor. The accusation of a lack of empathy is just one of several accusations that Scholz has to listen to at an event that is remarkably exemplary of the state of the climate debate in Germany.
Jeschke and his colleague Lea Bonasera literally forced Scholz to even take time for her. The two of them went on a hunger strike together with other activists in August to get a live broadcast of the debate with Scholz, CDU leader Armin Laschet and the Greens co-chair Annalena Baerbock. The three candidates for chancellor agreed not to allow themselves to be blackmailed. The activists eventually relented in exchange for meeting Scholz after the election. Seven weeks later, the time has come: Bonasera and Jeschke meet with Scholz in the premises of the SPD-affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is now chaired by the SPD chancellor candidate Martin Schulz, who failed in 2017. The debate cannot be seen live on television, but it can be seen on the Internet; moderated by the journalist Sara Schurmann.
Counterpart, but not the bad guy
“I am desperate, we are in a deadly climate crisis”, the student Bonasera opens the conversation. Your group calls itself the “last generation” because your year is the last to prevent a climate collapse, a comprehensive destruction of the basis of human life. Young people are driven by a corresponding urgency. The Hanseatic Scholz, with his factual and calmly presented arguments, is the perfect cast for the role of the counterpart. Alone: Scholz does not want to be the villain. After all, he will soon be the “Climate Chancellor”, as he promised the people in the days before the election on extra-large election posters.
“I do believe that we have great challenges for all of mankind,” says Scholz, countering the accusation that he did not understand the urgency of the situation, and lists climate change as a major issue alongside avoiding war, flight and hunger. “I want to make sure that there are no disasters,” assures Scholz. But how he wants to do that really pulls Bonasera and Jeschke from their seats. Again and again they interrupt Scholz because they can hardly stand the fact that they too only get to hear what Scholz has talked about during the entire election campaign: that Germany must quickly achieve an industrial transformation that is so successful that the whole world must even succeed cannot help but follow the German example. “In any case, I believe that what we do can make the world a better place,” says Scholz.
Is it going to be awful or totally awful?
Above all, the 21-year-old Jeschke only makes Scholz’s statements more angry than they were based on: “Nobody can live on steel”, he acknowledges the plans of the coming federal government for industrial transformation with disinterest. Because the world is running out of time. “We have three to four years to avoid hot periods,” says Jescke. “Are you aware of what a four-degree world means?” He asks Scholz. Both activists have made it clear that Scholz should publicly state that climate catastrophe and masses of climate deaths will come in any case and the only question now is whether it will be terrible or totally terrible.
Jeschke tries with vivid examples of people who die in heat at 50 degrees Celsius in Berlin and children who ask their mothers why they have to ration the bread even though the climate crisis was foreseeable. “Billions dead: does that leave you cold, Mr. Scholz?” Asks Jeschke. On this evening, Scholz very quickly found himself in the ungrateful role of the person who was supposed to defend all federal politics and the German climate balance on behalf of the country. He accepts, and this has to be credited to him, that role.
“How did you come up with this megalomaniac self-assessment of denying other people the seriousness”, asks Scholz the activists and moderator Schurmann, whom he suspects to be in the camp of the activists. Anyone who has seen Olaf Scholz more often knows: Hamburgers tend to be quieter than louder when they want to serve. He accuses Schurmann of a “fancy polemic” when it draws the comparison, if the climate crisis were the corona pandemic, the politicians still acted as if it were a flu – as if they had still not understood the seriousness of the situation.
“I have a plan”
But Scholz does not want to put up with this accusation. “You have nice pictures, but still not a single specific suggestion,” says Scholz in the direction of Jeschke and Bonesera. He repeatedly accuses them of “fatalism” and asserts: “I have a plan.” The almost ten billion people on earth could not be fed without industry, so industry must become climate-friendly worldwide. In itself, this project is colossal and the denial of recognition for it frustrated Scholz recognizable: The real opponents are the climate change deniers and those who have long since given up all hope of saving the world from the worst.
“We have three to four years, Mr. Scholz, not 25,” warns Jeschke to act quickly. However, the only accusation that Jeschke and Bonasera can actually pin down on Scholz is the course of the previous and future federal government with regard to natural gas. Working “comfortably with gas as a transition technology” is just as bad as generating electricity from coal, claims Jeschke. The gas criticism is flanked by Estban Servat. The Argentinian and an indigenous activist from Mexico were invited by the activists and, with their statements, hijack the question and answer session planned for the end of the debate. Servat criticizes the fact that Germany rejects gas production using the fracking method in its own country as harmful to the environment, but German companies extract fracking gas abroad – including Wintershall Dea in Servat’s home country Argentina.
The hour-long debate, if you want to call it that, is a stress test for the future head of government of the Federal Republic. Scholz can become snotty, biting, and criticize when he’s angry. He has clearly made up his mind not to do anyone this favor. But he doesn’t make a murder pit out of his heart either: “What I don’t accept, despite all the emotion – I try to hold back, I have some too –“says Scholz, the impression is that what he has set out to do is easy. But he will have to get used to the fact that the self-appointed climate chancellor will not always be seen as such in the climate protection camp.
Blackmailing and threatening as a method
Bonasera and Jeschke evidently never hoped that the exchange could lead to a mutually satisfactory result. You came up with a plan. Towards the end, both of them declare in clearly coordinated sentences: “The words have been spoken enough.” They are calling for Scholz to have a law against food waste and a plan to transform industrial agriculture into sustainable one by the end of the year. “Otherwise we will shut down the Federal Republic,” says Jeschke. “You have until the end of the year to prove it.” Otherwise, explains Bonasera, “we feel it is our duty to cause massive disruptions from January” – albeit “non-violently”.
It’s a strange finale that the two of them have come up with. Bonasera and Jeschke pressed Scholz into dialogue with a hunger strike. Now the activists want to blackmail him into political action. The fact that the deadline set lacks any realistic basis – the coming federal government will be able to work properly for a handful of weeks at most by January – makes the demand practically unattainable.
The fact that climate activists take radical measures because they believe the federal government is not doing enough could worry a Federal Chancellor Scholz and his traffic light coalitioners even more often. In any case, the climate panic screamed in the face of the climate chancellor that evening. But Scholz can’t do anything with panic. Whether calm blood is called for in the climate crisis can only be answered with certainty when it is perhaps already too late.