Abstract
Fridays for Future has risen as a new environmental movement pushing politicians to take action against climate change. However, its interaction with other political actors, most importantly political parties, has hardly been addressed systematically by scientific research. In this article, we take stock of party reactions to the movement on the national and subnational level in Germany. Furthermore, we investigate possible explanations for variances in these reactions in a comparison of subnational party organisations and thereby, focus on dynamics of party competition, especially on the impact of the Green Party as established contender and of the populist radical right AfD and its new role in environmental politics. We show that party reactions to the movement vary widely reflecting a clear divide on the left-right-spectrum. While centre-left parties, particularly the Green Party, support the movement, centre-right parties are utmost cautious and the populist radical right AfD stands out with a blatantly hostile attitude. Though indications for the impact of party competition dynamics were minor, we observed a strong polarisation on the climate issue that may take effect in the near future.
Highlights
Since 2018, Fridays for Future (FfF) has risen as a new environmental movement pushing politicians to take action against climate change
We attribute a special role to the German Green Party and the populist radical right party (PRRP)3 Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) and aim to explore their impact on party reactions overall
Since variance of party ideology is almost guaranteed in German multi-party systems and environmental issue ownership is almost exclusively aligned with the Green Party, we focus on increasing the variance of the other two factors choosing parties from Länder which differ distinctively in terms of their governmental com
Summary
Since 2018, Fridays for Future (FfF) has risen as a new environmental movement pushing politicians to take action against climate change. In order to provide a comprehensive view on party reactions to the new movement, we shift attention to possible explanations for the variance of reactions. For this purpose, we draw upon existing research While an effect of green parties in the field of environmental policy is already an established subject of political science research, the latter only recently receives some more attention Understanding both parties as central factors in our analysis, in the wake of rising PRRP influence, we intend, in particular, to move the AfD to the limelight and examine its possible impact.
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