Two years after disappearing from the streets due to the protective measures against Covid-19, Brno’s high school demonstrators from Fridays For Future returned this Friday, June 17 to demand stronger and more concrete policies to address climate change. Photo credit: Coline Béguet / Brno Daily
Brno, June 18 (BD) – Fridays for Future is an international youth movement that aims to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. It started in Sweden in August 2018 when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists started their school strike and sat in front of the Swedish parliament every school day for three weeks. Thanks to social media, the movement quickly spread abroad.
It started in Czech Republic less than a year later, with a first protest organised in Prague in March 2019. Hundreds of students walked through the streets of the capital, demanding climate justice. A few weeks later, in April, the movement had spread throughout the country, and arrived in Brno with some sarcastic posters saying “It is so important that even people from Brno care”.
Since the beginning, the main target of the Czech branch of Fridays For Future has been coal mining. Indeed, coal extraction and use is still important in the Czech Republic, and the Czech government has promised to stop it by 2033, but without any concrete or specific plan for how to make this transition to renewable energies.
However, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, dealing with the problematic issue of the Czech dependence on Russian fossil fuels has become another important target for the demonstrators. The Czech branch of the movement is also trying to communicate and coordinate closely with other Central and Eastern European countries that are in a similar situation.
For the past two years, Fridays For Future’s activities have been significantly hindered by the Covid-19 pandemic, but members have continued to communicate online, and have been working on “from high schoolers to high schoolers” educational activities and on the structure of their organisation, in order to be ready when the time comes.
Demonstrations have now restarted, first in Prague last month and then in Brno on Friday. The protesters were fewer than they were in 2019, but the organisers are confident in the future of the movement. They believe that it will “just take time” for the movement to regain its pre-pandemic momentum, and that it will continue to grow.
