While the police in Lützerath are pushing ahead with the evacuation of the village, climate activists have started solidarity actions in several other places in Germany. These aim to increase the pressure on the Greens. The party has been particularly criticized by the climate movement since it agreed to a compromise between the state government and the energy company RWE in North Rhine-Westphalia, which provides for an earlier phase-out of coal, but also for the excavation of Lützerath.
A group that calls itself the “Interventionist Left” has been occupying the state party headquarters of the Greens in Düsseldorf since around 3 p.m., as have the police and Martin Lechtape, the press spokesman for the North Rhine-Westphalia Greens Süddeutsche Zeitung confirmed. “We asked them to leave and called the police,” said Lechtape. The activists call on Twitterthe state chairwoman Mona Neubauer may enforce a moratorium to stop the eviction in Lützerath.
There was also an action by climate activists in Flensburg: there the “Ende Gelände” group occupied the regional office of Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck, as the Flensburg daily newspaper reported. Habeck had previously criticized the protests in Lützerath. The place is “the wrong symbol,” he said on ZDF on Wednesday evening. Lützerath does not stand for “the continuation of the energy policy of the past”, but is on the contrary the “final stroke” under the power generation from lignite.
Habeck sees the early phase-out of coal from 2038 to 2030 in the Rhenish mining area as a success and the abandonment of Lützerath as a necessary evil. According to Habeck, he does not like the fact that more lignite had to be used to generate electricity temporarily in the past few months. But it was essential because of the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis.
Activists are struggling with the rainy and stormy weather
On the edge of the operation, a civilian police vehicle went up in flames. “We are definitely assuming arson,” said a police spokesman. The vehicle was parked near the protest camp in Keyenberg and was clearly identifiable as a police car thanks to a blue light on the roof. It is assumed that the perpetrators smashed the window and poured a flammable liquid into the car.
A policeman uses a crowbar to open the window of a wooden hut. On the second day of the eviction, the officers also penetrated the homesteads and tree houses.
(Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa)
The rainy and stormy weather is troubling the activists in Lützerath. The situation is particularly dangerous for those people who are in the tree houses, said a spokeswoman for the “Lützi stays” initiative. Some activists also appear to have dug and holed up in a tunnel on the site, claiming there is an entire “tunnel system” beneath the site. The Aachen police chief Dirk Weinspach has confirmed the existence of “underground structures”.
According to Weinspach, the clearing of the lignite mining town of Lützerath is well advanced. “The clearing of the above-ground structures is largely complete,” he said on Thursday evening on WDR. “We have cleared almost all the houses except for one. The meadow has been cleared, most of the tree houses have been cleared. In this respect, there is not much left,” he said.
However, it is not possible to say how long the operation will last. The evacuation could be delayed by underground passages that were discovered on Thursday. According to the police, there are still activists there. “It is not foreseeable how long the evacuation from the underground soil structures will take. It will also be important to proceed very carefully and not to take any risks,” said the police chief.
With material from the dpa news agency