Greta Laughs at the Movement She Founded - "They Still Do That?"

STOCKHOLM - Greta Thunberg had a fit of laughter when she heard that Fridays for Future is still demonstrating in Berlin.

"Really? They still do that?" she said. The clip has been watched by millions and drawn fierce criticism. Now she is hitting back at the German climate movement - and calling it racist.

Fridays for Future began in August 2018, when a 15-year-old Thunberg sat down outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm and went on school strike for the climate. The movement spread around the world and millions of schoolchildren followed her.

Eight years later, the founder herself seems to find the whole thing a bit silly.

That is what a clip from the German documentary "Auf Panzern in die Klimakrise" ("On Tanks Into the Climate Crisis") shows. Filmmaker Hubertus Koch posted it on YouTube on 28 October.

Koch meets Thunberg in Berlin last summer, together with two of her activist friends. He says in English that it feels "a bit symbolic" that they are meeting on the same day Fridays for Future is holding a demonstration in the city.

Thunberg bursts out laughing. "Really? They still do that?" she says, according to the documentary's own subtitles. She and her friends keep laughing until Thunberg turns to the camera and shouts "cut".

Millions of views

The clip first spread on X on 11 November and quickly took off. The New York Post wrote about it, and the paper's post on X has been viewed more than 22 million times.

In Germany, Bild, Welt, taz and Spiegel were among those covering the clip. Bild called the laughter "a slap in the face" to the hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who have gone on strike on Fridays since 2018.

Well-known German columnist Jan Fleischhauer wrote on X: "If Greta Thunberg is laughing herself to death at people still taking to the streets for the climate, why should Friedrich Merz fly to the climate summit in Ankara instead of celebrating his birthday at the Italian place?"

The clip was also widely shared in Sweden. "Seems she accidentally revealed that she knows the whole thing is a scam," one user wrote on X.

READ ALSO: Greta Said Somali Deportees Were Not Criminals - Several Are Convicted

The filmmaker defends her

Hubertus Koch, who openly sympathises with the activists, says on Instagram that the clip is "completely taken out of context". According to him, Thunberg has "outgrown" Fridays for Future, which she was part of between the ages of 15 and 18.

He says she has concluded that permitted demonstrations, panel debates, audiences with the Pope and talks with Merz and Obama "have structurally changed nothing". Instead, she now devotes herself to civil disobedience and suing states.

Luisa Neubauer, the best-known face of Fridays for Future in Germany, played it down. She told taz that people should not "dwell on some video clips" and called for "a bit more calm, gentleness and generosity" between activists.

Calls the Germans racists

Thunberg herself has not apologised. Quite the opposite.

In an Instagram post quoted by Unilad and the Daily Mail, among others, she explains that the interview was filmed on the same day she and other activists blockaded an arms manufacturer.

At the same time, she writes, a police-approved climate march was taking place "in a notoriously white middle-class area". According to her, it was organised by the same German climate movement that "distanced itself" from her for saying that "Palestinians are also human".

Make no mistake; the world is ridiculing Germany for being disconnected from reality and stuck in extremely racist mindsets and tactics.

- Greta Thunberg on Instagram

From climate to Gaza

The break with the German branch began after the Hamas terror attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Thunberg clearly took the Arab side, while Fridays for Future Germany distanced itself and accused her of "misusing" the climate movement.

Since then, Gaza and the fight against "militarisation" have taken up more and more of her time. She has twice sailed towards Gaza with so-called freedom flotillas and been detained by the Israeli military. In the documentary, Koch meets her at a Palestinian restaurant in Berlin.

She has not entirely left the climate behind, though. This week she is attending the UN climate summit COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, where she has accused world leaders of being "completely disconnected from reality".