According to the Portugal remigration summit’s official website, the meeting was about “shaping the future of Europe and the West through sovereignty, identity, and demographic renewal” – a euphemism of creating imagined racially pure Western societies.
Farid Hafez
A month ago, Europe’s extremist activists from the Identitarian Movement gathered with international far-right leaders to discuss a policy that is gathering momentum against the backdrop of the rise and normalisation of the far-right nationalist agenda of “remigration” across the Global North.
When in January 2024, the investigative German paper Correctiv revealed information about deliberations from a secretive meeting in the city of Potsdam, thousands of people across Germany took to the streets to rally against a rising political movement.
According to the reporting, on 25 November 2023, a small, but influential group of people met in Potsdam. The group included members of the rising far-right political party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), members of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its fringe split-off, the “Value Union” (Werteunion) represented by the former director of the domestic intelligence service BVT (Federal Office of the Protection of the Constitution).
They met to listen to the key speaker Martin Sellner, a vocal preacher of the pan-European right-wing extremist group the Identitarian Movement. It was Sellner’s main thesis about “remigration” that created uproar in Germany’s civil society.
Remigration was a response to a conspiracy theory about the ‘Great Replacement’, suggesting finding legal pathways to get rid of Europe’s non-white population.
Great Replacement theory
According to the replacement conspiracy theory, there are hidden powers planning the replacement of the white, Christian population with non-white peoples of other cultures, religions, and traditions, especially Muslims.
There are different iterations of this conspiracy that originated from the French author Renaud Camus. One is the conspiracy of Eurabia, which argues that European political elites conspired with leaders of the Middle East/North Africa region to replace the native population with Muslim immigrants.
Another one is that Jewish billionaire George Soros planned to infiltrate Europe by bringing over African and Muslim immigrants to Europe.
Aspects of these conspiracies are an alleged leftist-Islamist alliance expressed in terms such as Islamo-Gauchisme, which appears as a new manifestation of what Judeo-Bolshevism constitutes in antisemitic thinking.
Remigration as a policy
Back in Potsdam, the members were fully aware of the limits of such unconstitutional measures to get rid of non-whites.
Hence, they discussed how remigration could take place by legal means. It was suggested that pressure should be created to push out non-desirable populations so they would leave themselves.
Most importantly, this should also include German citizens, creating a difference between citizens of white and non-white descendants. This should help to “secure the ethnocultural continuity of European nations,” Sellner said later.
In other words, the end game is to re-whiten the Western world by creating what they would see as homogenous white societies that pushes back non-white populations to where they or their ancestors came from.
Protest and normalisation
While the immediate reaction was people taking to the streets and protesting these ideas and the rapprochement of individuals from the far-right and the centre-right, other political actors from the far-right such as the leaders of the Austrian far-right FPÖ fully embraced these ideas.
The AfD felt pressured to distance itself, publishing a full explanation to explain that the deportation of non-white citizens was not how they understood remigration.
But this way, the idea of remigration became normalised, allowing the AfD to use the notion in a playful way. And while initially members of the rising far-right parties such as the French National Rally distanced themselves from the contested idea of remigration, this has changed more recently when the Donald Trump administration embraced it.
With MAGA in power, the US State Department proclaimed to establish an Office of Remigration that should focus on reducing immigration to the US.
With the recognition of the leading global power, no one can claim that the idea is marginal anymore.
It is at the backdrop of this shift of Making the West White Again that we have to situate the recent remigration summit and its relevance for the shifting politics of a rising far-right in the Global North.
On 30 May, the pan-European Identitarian Movement organised the second “Remigration Summit” at the Quinta da Salmanha venue in the coastal city of Figueira da Foz, Portugal.
Following a first convention in in 2025 that was hosted in Milan, Italy, in May 2025, the summit has gained momentum by the harsh deportation politics in the US.
And it brought together more than 500 people, including representatives of leading political parties and movements from – amongst others – Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the UK and the United States.
20-30 project for ‘racially pure’ white society
According to the organiser’s official website, the summit is about “shaping the future of Europe and the West through sovereignty, identity, and demographic renewal” – a euphemism of creating imagined racially pure Western societies.
Remigration, for them, “is the answer to decades of replacement migration and multiculturalism that have disintegrated our nations to the point of dysfunction.”
It would be a process taking place over the next 20-30 years, aiming at what they call “returning illegal immigrants and harmful legal migrants, and putting pressure on the non-assimilated parallel societies to reharmonise the nation culturally.”
The idea of “parallel societies” is a German invention, giving a name of alleged self-separation of non-white populations who were enlisted as guest workers half a century ago and concentrated in poor areas, putting the blame on them rather than on the original host societies that did not treat them as full humans, but rather as racialised working poor that would return back to their homes once their jobs were done.
“Non-assimilated parallel societies” here stands for communities that do not assimilate but hold to their religious identities, i.e. Muslims, and clearly contradicts claims of the AfD that these measures are legal and constitutional.
US participation
Most relevant in this year’s summit were the participation of two American “VIP guests,” Gregory Bovino, the self-styled “Nazi-look” former chief of the US Border Patrol as well as the American white nationalist Jared Taylor.
Bovino, who led the brutal crackdown and theatrically televised deportations of ICE on American streets and was dismissed from his position after agents under his command killed a 37-year-old nurse in Minneapolis celebrated sharing his “expertise” on tackling “illegal aliens destroying European culture.”
The success of further normalising this idea have to be seen at the backdrop of America’s shift to the extreme right.
A few days ago, US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth criticised European political elites during a commemoration speech in France for their immigration policies saying that “dangerous ideologies” were storming the continent’s shores, calling it an “invasion.”
And the 47th president himself had put it more bluntly during a trip to Europe, saying that European leaders should “stop this horrible invasion” because “this immigration is killing Europe.”
Now it’s the far-right rallying to institutionalise the idea of remigration to get rid of its non-white population.
Europe’s future depends as much on how anti-fascist positions push back against the normalisation of this racist ideology.
