Our ECI is an official action from Fridays For Future.
What does official mean?
Fridays for Future is a decentralized network of people across Europe. They are not called FFF everywhere, but they all are in contact with each other (You know the people going to the streets every Friday to protest the inactivity of politics regarding climate change).
In order to make anything official in this horizontal form of activism, it means getting in contact with everyone, as everyone is FFF. So that is what we did. The ECI team formed in April and quickly grew to around 150 activists. We were looking if we had at least one striker from every EU-nation. For a long time we did not have contact to Malta, but eventually we found activists even there.
The next step was working out a first draft. The requirements for an ECI are tight and require a strict character limit (500Chars for the aims). It feels like writing a Tweet to the European Commission.
Once the draft was done, we contacted national FFF groups. Most of the contacted accepted the draft as it was. (It was a bit more harmless than now) but Germany, Sweden and Italy had something to say, so in the end we handed in the 5th Draft as final document.
There was a bit of time pressure, as the commission takes 2 months to accept an ECI. We wanted to have it ready for the 20th of September, so we handed it in on the 19th of July.
Commission has opened signature collection on Monday the 23rd of September.
So far the ECI has been legislated by:
- Austria,
- Cyprus,
- Denmark,
- Estonia,
- Finland,
- France,
- Germany,
- Greece,
- Italy,
- Latvia,
- Luxembourg,
- Malta,
- Netherlands,
- Spain,
- Switzerland
Within FFF Sweden the ECI will not be supported because of our demands being too low. We hope that the European Union will consider the economic viability of harsher demands as well.
We hope that other national FFF-groups that have not yet “officially” accepted our ECI, will do so.
In case you need a reminder which countries are missing:
Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Ireland, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia.
In case you are active in one of these countries, please bring it to the table, talk about it, and in case you collectively decide to support the ECI, please contact us, or join our telegram channel.
