Emotions and Future Narratives in Digital Climate Activism: An Analysis of Fridays for Future Germany

Climate change and the accompanying climate crisis will be a key social challenge in the coming years. The associated social discourse is increasingly characterized by narratives about the future, ranging from dystopian doomsday scenarios to utopian visions of transformation. In recent years, there has been an increase in global crises, with uncertainty increasingly perceived as a permanent state of affairs. Since 2015, both left-wing and right-wing populist movements, as well as the climate movement, have gained in importance. These developments are closely linked to increasing social polarization in liberal democracies, which is further exacerbated by digital communication media. While these media enable new forms of opinion-forming, they also promote echo chambers and filter bubbles. In this context, climate change is not only an acute crisis, but also a battleground for competing narratives about the future. The global sustainability crisis poses existential challenges and requires structural change. The perception of the climate crisis as an existential threat has led to mobilization, especially among younger generations. Movements such as Fridays for Future, Last Generation, and Extinction Rebellion are campaigning for far-reaching climate protection measures. This activism is meeting with resistance: conservative and right-wing populist movements are questioning climate policy, denying the crisis, or propagating exclusive visions of the future that are more closely associated with nationalism or growth ideologies. Ideas about the future have become a contested political field in which competing visions of development clash and emotional debates are fought out. This study analyzes approximately 6,000 tweets from the social movement Fridays for Future Germany to examine how visions of the future are negotiated and legitimized in the context of the climate crisis. It investigates narrative strategies used to achieve interpretive sovereignty and how these strategies developed between 2018 and 2026. Methodologically, the study combines digital discourse analysis (natural language processing) with hermeneutic depth analysis to analyze large text corpora while capturing narrative subtleties and semantic shifts. This mixed-methods approach reveals both dominant and marginalized themes. Building on narrative policy research, we developed a 16-dimensional classification scheme that captures central elements of political narratives: problem definitions and solution approaches, actors (heroes, victims, adversaries, obstructers, allies, supporters), events (positive, negative, neutral), visions of the future (utopia, apocalypse, post-apocalypse), as well as calls to action and decisions. In addition, structural topic models are used to uncover latent text structures. At the same time, the use of basic emotions is analyzed with the pre-trained RoBERTa model. The system enables scalable, transparent analysis of future narratives in large social media corpora through machine learning, and the complete explainability of each classification aims at traceability and transparency. This contribution addresses key methodological challenges of Panel 8 and offers modern computational methods for analyzing emotional and narrative dimensions of polarized climate politics. By combining expert knowledge, deep learning, and psycholinguistics, it contributes to a deeper understanding of how a social movement such as Fridays for Future Germany uses emotional frames, future narratives in particular, and narratives in general to mobilize politically.