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Greta's First School Strike
Greta Thunberg climate activist started a school strike for climate. Due to the coming Swedish elections, she demanded urgent actions on the climate crisis. The strike started three weeks before the elections. Greta sat outside of her school as a protest. The day before the election 8th of September, her fellow school strikers decided to continue their strike and then they encouraged other youngsters to join them. The movement became international as they created the hashtag #FridaysForFuture. -
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Growing movement and become global #FFF
Students joined to the movement on an international scale. The main protest tool was not to attend at their classes in school on fridays. In countries like Colombia, New Zealand and Uganda, through Germany and UK, the movement got bigger. The #FFF outlined concrete goals regarding the Paris Climate Agreement. The main objective was to make pressure on lawmakers to reduce carbon emissions in countries. The issue became immediately a hot-topic as the youngsters got international media attention. -
Influence on politics - EU
As the #FFF became very popular, the lawmakers could not avoid the confrontation further. Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission on that time announced in a speech next Greta Thunberg his intent to spend hundred of billions of euros on climate-change mitigation. This amount was a fourth of the EU budget at that time. The act was the first huge achievement of the movement as it has global significance. -
First Global Strike
The first #FFF global strike gathered more than one millions strikers in 2,200 strikes organised in 125 countries on the very same day. The success of the movement encouraged the members to get more and more supporters. This First Global Strike pushed further the movement to continue the global networking and a few months later, #FFF became one of the most important issue in the coming European Parliament election. -
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Strenghten positions globally
From Spring of 2019 #FFF rapidly became a globally significant movement. After the first one in March, the Second Global Climate Strike took place on 24 May 2019 as hundrerds of thousands of school students participated in 1600 towns in at least 125 countries. On 23 September 2019, Greta Thunberg addressed a speech to UN leaders. The speech was so powerful that it became immediately viral on the web. Criticism of capitalism by Greta was firstly highlighted here as the fundament of her speech. -
Greta - Time Person of The Year 2019
As the #FFF became global, soonly the media started to recognize of the importance of Greta's climate activism and #FFF achievements. At the end of 2019, after several Global Climate Strikes and getting more political influence, Greta Thunberg was named as the Person of The Year 2019 by the The Time. -
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Emerging Political Purposes
Later the movement slowly became more political as the members started to analyzing the reasons behind of climate change. Many of them highlighted the capitalism as the main reason so the movement became more leftist during the time. This was in according with the worldwide phenomena as inflation and economic crisis hit hard on people with lower standards of living. From that #FFF cannot be considered as an only-green-or-liberal movement as the leftist economic acts apperead in their agenda. -
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COVID-19 and Digital Climate Strike
As every political movement in the world, #FFF was very affected by COVID-19 as most of its members were forced to stay at home. As remote education spread within a short time, #FFF had to find new ways to mobilize its member base to protest. In March 2020, Greta Thunberg encouraged the movement to not gather in the streets, but to instead sit at home with a sign and post the image on internet. The goal was to get engagement with a series of campaigns for raising awareness in climate justice. -
My experience with #FFF
On the Fall of 2021, I was in Baden-Württemberg, Germany with an Erasmus scholarship program. On 24 September 2021 strikes scheduled in more than 1400 locations around the globe. The largest demonstrations were held in Germany, as Greta Thunberg addressed more than 100,000 people in Berlin with "No political party is doing enough." I participated in strike in Heilbronn. This was right before the federal elections of Germany, and many oppositional leftist and liberal parties appeared there too. -
The present of Greta and #FFF
After the #FFF slowly transitioned from an issue-based movement towards a political movement, Greta Thunberg appeared in more and more political news. After the terrorist attack in Gaza in October 2023, Greta showed up as a #ProPalestine activist. Many members of #FFF said that this kind of appearence erodes the trust and recognition of the movement in the public opinion. The members of #FFF Israel distanced themselves from Greta as they sad this weakens the validity of the movement.