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ERKELENZ (dpa-AFX) - On the second day of the eviction of Lützerath, police gained access to the largest yard of the lignite site and took out numerous activists. Elsewhere, tree-cutting and demolition work by RWE continued. The energy company owns the village. It wants to remove the buildings in order to access the coal deposit located under Lützerath. Activists want to prevent this for fear of serious consequences for the climate from coal combustion. Among demonstrators on Thursday was Fridays for Future activist Luisa Neubauer. On the political stage, the clearance of Lützerath continues to put the Greens to the test.

To express their criticism of the Lützerath eviction, about 800 people gathered about four kilometers away, according to police. The demonstration procession started in Keyenberg, another district of Erkelenz, and then headed towards Lützerath. Neubauer, who was among the participants, accused the police of disproportionate action. The fact that the police had continued the eviction in the dark and into the night was dangerous and incomprehensible, she complained.

However, the demonstrators did not get as far as Lützerath. On an access road to the lignite town, a group of them was encircled, including Neubauer and Greenpeace board member Martin Kaiser. The protesters, who were sitting to block the way, were surrounded by police officers. "We want to sit here until we are carried away," Neubauer told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

A police spokesman said the participants were on their way to the open pit quarry. This was dangerous and had to be prevented by the police, he said. According to Neubauer, the police had also used pepper spray against activists in isolated cases. To this the police spokesman said, he could neither confirm nor exclude this.

The village is now surrounded by a one-and-a-half-kilometer-long double fence, which RWE had erected in no time at all. This was to mark the company's premises, to which unauthorized persons would have no access, a company spokesman said. Two excavators began destroying a former agricultural hall on Thursday.

Thursday night had been largely peaceful. Police pulled activists from the roof of a warehouse and a woman with her feet cemented into the ground from a wrecked car. Elsewhere, two women sat, each with an arm concreted into a barrel. In the window of one shack was a note that read "Attention Taped." In fact, someone had glued his hands to the glass pane from the inside, as could be seen from the outside. With such actions, people wanted to send a signal and slow down the eviction.

A climate activist holding out in a tree house posted a video on Twitter at noon Thursday expressing his disappointment with the tree-cutting operations. "It's bitter, bitter, bitter that trees are being cut down during the climate crisis so that lignite can be burned, which is destroying the planet." He added that people would continue to fight to ensure that Lützerath was "impossible to clear."

From time to time during the night and in the morning there had been firecracker throws and the ignition of fireworks rockets on the part of the activists, no one was injured. One officer was hit by a paint bag.

The stormy and rainy weather troubled the activists. "We hope the storm will not get any stronger," a spokeswoman for the "Lützerath lebt" initiative said Thursday morning. She said the situation was dangerous for the people in the tree houses. "Normally, they come down during storms." How many activists are still in Lützerath, she did not say.

For the Greens, the eviction is becoming more and more of a burden: both in the federal government and in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the eco-party is part of the governing coalition. Last year, two Greens, Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck and NRW Economics Minister Mona Neubaur, of all people, presented an agreement with RWE that cleared the way for coal to be mined under Lützerath in return for bringing forward the coal phase-out in NRW by eight years to 2030. For this deal, the leadership of the Green Party had to listen to sharp criticism from climate activists, but also from their own ranks.

North Rhine-Westphalia's Environment Minister Oliver Krischer expressed regret about the eviction on "WDR 5." "This is a difficult time, the environment minister sleeps badly, because it hurts me," said the Green. He said he understands that young people in particular are dissatisfied with the pace of climate protection and demand more efforts. At the same time, however, the Green defended the agreement with RWE as "good" because it "writes the last chapter in the coal phase-out in North Rhine-Westphalia."

Green Party member of the Bundestag Nyke Slawik voiced criticism. "I'm alienated," she wrote on Twitter. "Alienated by how some defend the eviction in Lützerath and the deal with RWE."

It is unclear how long the Lützerath eviction will last. Observers had originally expected several weeks, but given the swift action of the police, it could be over sooner than initially thought./wdw/amr/DP/mis