Relationship to politics
Although Neubauer is a member of Alliance 90/The Greens and the Green Youth, she says she does not actively pursue party work. At the Alliance 90/The Greens policy convention on 29 March 2019, Neubauer gave a speech that was received with much applause. She called for an emissions budget for Germany. "If even the Greens can't do that, then I don't know why we're even taking to the streets", Neubauer said.
Neubauer assessed the 2019 European elections as a key event to motivate the European youth to protect climate. According to her, the Grand Coalition failed after the climate strikes began. They were postponing the adoption of a climate protection law and were celebrating a coal phase-out that is ten years too late for the climate.
At the EU summit in Sibiu in May 2019, Neubauer joined other climate activists in meeting Emmanuel Macron and eight other EU leaders.
In an interview with Tagesthemen (one of Germany's main daily television news magazines) on 20 August 2020, after a meeting with other activists and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Luisa Neubauer expressed skepticism about the German government's activities to achieve the climate target of 1.5 degrees global warming. "Who, if not Germany, could lead the way here?" She also expressed irritation about the commissioning of new coal-fired power plants.
During a Spiegel interview with member of German parliament Wolfgang Schäuble at the end of October 2020, Neubauer emphasized the special status of the climate crisis as a problem that affects all areas of life. A stable democracy and a good economy require a stable planet. Ultimately, he said, it was "about us humans" for whom the climate crisis would eventually become unbearable. Measured by the Paris climate goals and scientific findings, action is clearly too slow. The price for this is an escalating climate crisis. "And nothing will rob us of more freedom than this crisis. The slower we are, the greater the destruction, the greater the restriction of freedom in the end."
In a double interview in September 2021 with Der Tagesspiegel (a German daily newspaper), which interviewed her along with Greta Thunberg, Neubauer criticized the media and politicians for downplaying or ignoring the climate crisis for decades. Chancellor Angela Merkel never once "went out on a limb" for climate change, never took a serious risk "to move the country noticeably toward climate-friendly democracy". As a result, it remains unclear how the public would respond on the question of how just a form of climate protection is, in which there is no real social compensation for rising costs for housing heating and fuel for internal combustion cars due to increased CO2 prices, Neubauer said that Fridays for Future is a movement for climate justice. It also demands socially just climate protection. She said it's important to be vigilant in this debate: "We experience political voices that never supported climate action now using social inequality as an excuse to do nothing."
Neubauer, writing in Der Spiegel in December 2024, argues that the political backsliding on climate protection in Germany over the past two years or so is the responsibility of everyone. She advocates an urgent deployment of the decarbonization solutions we have at hand. And she says she is repeatedly asked these days whether it is too late to act — to which she replies: "Now is not the time for self‑pity."
In January 2025, Neubauer told The Guardian newspaper that "like many, I did buy into the idea that big catastrophes would do something to politics" and also believed that "there was a democratic responsibility that would live through coalition [government] changes and climate changes". Neubauer indicated the biggest failure of Fridays for Future Germany was not to embed climate policy across the political spectrum "in a way that it could sustainably live on without us". Neubauer also argued that "it is no longer green technologies that are the issue, but the fight for democracy and truth" and furthermore that "if there's no shared reality in which we operate, it will be impossible to move forward with the climate transition".
At the opening of the 2025 Berlinale, Neubauer wore a long formal dress with slogans suggesting that CDU/CSU chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz was normalizing far‑right politics. Neubauer's conduct drew strong criticism from Ralf Schumacher.
