Austria: Last Generation movement disbands
The Austrian branch of the Last Generation movement has announced that it will discontinue its climate protection protests. "We no longer see any prospect of success," the group explained. Commentators debate what the group's controversial protest actions, such as gluing themselves to roads with fast-acting adhesives, have achieved.
No one wanted to follow their example
Last Generation failed to win society over to its cause, Die Presse concludes:
“From the outset the group pursued two goals. First, to attract as much attention as possible. To its credit, it has achieved this with its controversial methods. ... But it was then unable to exploit this attention to achieve its second goal, namely to motivate a critical mass that politicians could no longer ignore. This idea was modelled primarily on the civil rights movement in the United States, which functioned according to the motto 'If one person refuses to give up their seat on a bus (as Rosa Parks once did), others will eventually do the same'.”
Counterproductive actions
The Last Generation activists' methods have only given climate deniers more amunition, writes Kleine Zeitung:
“Yes, the Last Generation group have the increasingly urgent warnings of science on their side, and yes, they have failed with every other form of civil disobedience. But resorting to bulldozer methods (or in this case fast-acting glue) to push through their cause doesn't work in a democratic system. ... In the end, the activists' controversial actions also gave a big boost to those who propagate the illusion of a world in which nothing has to change so that everything stays the way it used to be.”