BERLIN — Scores of climate activists glued themselves to roads across Berlin, blocking rush hour traffic and enraging some drivers on Monday.
Passersby shouted at the protesters from the “Letzte Generation” (Last Generation) group who stuck their hands to the tarmac and sat in rows across busy intersections in a bid to press the government to do more against climate change.
One man ran at a line of campaigners before he was pushed over by police, then helped to his feet and told to calm down.
A video shared by the campaign group on Twitter showed another man dragging two activists, one of them apparently by her ponytail, to the side of a road. Reuters could not verify the authenticity of that footage or when or where it was taken.
“This is just unbelievable, does everyone have to suffer because of them … It’s chaos everywhere, the whole city is in chaos, just lock them up!” said one passerby called Ali as he watched police carrying protesters off the A100 highway.
The group said it wanted the federal government to submit a detailed plan on how Germany can meet a target of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
“We no longer accept that the government has no plan to stop the destruction of our livelihoods. We’re resisting now!” Last Generation activist Carla Rochelin said in an emailed statement.
Police said they detained around 200 people in 35 locations across the capital. Officers watched over protest sites and used swabs to free the activists’ palms from the tarmac. In at least one case they used a drill to uproot a piece of pavement stuck to a man’s hand.
The protests comes less than a month after campaigners failed to get enough votes in a referendum that would have forced the city administration to bring in measures to be climate neutral by 2030.
