Emilia Fester was a parliamentary observer at the protests in Lützerath – what she experienced there keeps her busy.Image: Flashpic / Jens Krick
politics
Between 15,000 (police estimate) and 35,000 (organizers estimate) people flocked to North Rhine-Westphalia on the second weekend in January. Your destination: the village of Lützerath. The symbol of the overexploitation of the earth for some, a good compromise for others. KSpecifically, it is about the fact that the energy company RWE wants to excavate the village because there is lignite underneath.
From a legal point of view, the energy giant is allowed to do that. The residents of the village were expropriated, the court ruled in favor of RWE and the politics has agreed subject to West Germany phasing out coal by 2030. So everything is legal. But the climate movement does not want to accept that. The battle for Lützerath has been going on for a long time now. And escalated this weekend. with Allegations of violence from both sides: demonstrators and police.
Batons and pepper spray were used again and again during the large-scale demonstration.Image: dpa / Thomas Banneyer
Green politician Emilia Fester was there with a group of MPs to monitor the situation. A few days later, the politician is stunned on Instagram – and calls for drastic steps in dealing with the police.
It is clear, says Fester in her Instagram story, that the police operation at the demo was everything, but not “highly professional and very good”. The interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul (CDU), had described the operation on a talk show. But he had also made it clear that he would have every case of inappropriate police violence investigated.
Reul explained:
“We’ve seen a movie or two on the web where we’re like, ‘This doesn’t look good.’ We’ll take a close look at that, we’ve also filed a criminal complaint as a precaution, because I think it needs to be checked. I’ve always done that in the last few years, and that’s how it’s done now.”
But it’s not as if there were masses of “crazed police officers” at the demo. Fester herself has not seen any arbitrary police violence either, as she makes clear in her story. “Wherever I was as a parliamentary observer, this arbitrary police action didn’t happen,” she explains. But Fester knows the videos that are going around the web. And calls for clarification.
Image: screenshot / instagram
And not only that. Because what the Green politician saw very well is violence that emanated from the police. Fester reports:
“I could watch the police using pepper spray, batons and water cannons. But they announced that and accordingly: It was brutal, it was violent, but it wasn’t arbitrary.”
What Fester nevertheless noticed was the potential for police violence. Simply because of the unequal conditions on both sides of the demo: the police forces are equipped with pads, protective vests, helmets, shields, batons and pepper spray at such events. The demonstrators shouldn’t wrap themselves up like that. In Germany there is a ban on face masks. According to Fester, this even includes bicycle helmets. That means: The activists were completely unprotected.
Fester wants to negotiate the type of police work
From the point of view of the Green MPs, this imbalance means that there should be a general debate about “what the police are, what they are allowed to do and what they serve our society for.” Specifically, Fester is concerned with the question: “Is this the police force that we want?”
Image: screenshot / instagram
What shocked Fester, aside from the imbalance and brutality, was the way the police dealt with parliamentary observers and the press. Because there, too, representatives were pushed into the mud. Apart from the police communications team, the officers were also unwilling to talk about the operation.
The Green politician also makes it clear: In addition to all the discussions about the mission in Lützerath, it should not be forgotten to continue talking about the climate. Because that’s still important.
The fear of poverty in old age accompanies many young people. Long before they even get close to retirement. The sentence often comes up in conversations: “Oh, by the time we retire, we’ll drop dead anyway and we won’t get paid anything.”
