Climate change is being used as an explicit wedge by radical right parties that adopt a distinctively adversarial stance toward green policies. This strategy breaks with mainstream party consensus and aims to mobilise voter concerns about climate initiatives, reshaping issue competition around environmental policy.
This article asks how the social backgrounds of participants in 2019 Fridays for Future (FFF) protests across European cities related to who joined the protests and to protesters' strategic beliefs about how to address climate challenges. Using unique protest survey data collected at FFF events, the authors examine variation in participants' socioeconomic profiles and whether those backgrounds shaped preferences for institutions and approaches to climate and environmental action. The contribution is a nuanced account that rejects single-story portrayals of protesters as uniformly privileged or uniformly poor and highlights links between social composition and movement strategic orientations.