Potsdam, 25 November 2023. A bitterly cold day, like so many others in late autumn in Germany. And yet, that date was destined to become a kind of historical marker, drawing a line between a “before” and an “after”. Two months later, the independent investigative journalism network Correctiv revealed that, on that late-November morning, several members of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland, Austrian activist Martin Sellner and other members of his Identitarian Movement, alongside representatives of Germany’s wealthy elite and even a few CDU figures, had gathered at Villa Adlon, a hotel on the shores of Lake Lehnitzsee near Potsdam, to discuss specific plans on immigration.
The “Great Replacement” conspiracy
They were there to discuss remigration: the expulsion from the country of people of foreign origin, including German citizens. Coming just months before the 2024 European elections, the revelations triggered a wave of protests against the far right across Germany. Remigration became a scandal. Even French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen distanced herself from her German sovereigntist allies.
And yet, in retrospect, the Potsdam meeting would come to be remembered as a crucial step in normalising the concept of remigration within European public debate.
The idea was first articulated by French writer Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement (“The Great Replacement”), which advanced a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that white Christian European populations were being systematically replaced by non-European immigrants, primarily Africans and Muslims, with the complicity of political and economic elites.
Until 2022–23, however, the concept remained largely confined to far-right circles. In France, during the campaign for the April 2022 presidential election, Éric Zemmour, candidate and founder of the far-right Reconquête party, attempted to bring the idea into mainstream politics by proposing a “Ministry of Remigration”. Its objective: to deport at least 100,000 “undesirable foreigners” every year.
From conspiracy theory to the political mainstream
It was only towards the end of 2022 that the term made its decisive leap into the mainstream. This happened after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it X. One of the platform’s defining features under its new ownership was a dramatic weakening of content moderation, justified in the name of a new commitment to “freedom of speech”. Figures who had previously been banned, including Austrian activist Martin Sellner, returned to the platform.
As a result, online activity around remigration surged in 2024 and has grown exponentially ever since, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), published in January 2026.
Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States did the rest. Remigration moved from an underground idea of the radical right to a political agenda.
On 28 November 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security posted on X: “The stakes have never been higher, and the objective has never been clearer: remigration now.” Just hours earlier that same day, Trump had used the expression “reverse migration” in a post on Truth Social.
Camus’s idea has travelled further across the Atlantic than it has in his own country, where the Rassemblement National has kept its distance from the term itself, wary of appearing openly extremist. But this does not mean that the political substance behind the concept is absent from the agenda of the French nationalist right. Quite the opposite.
What is being proposed is the large-scale expulsion of migrants, asylum seekers, long-term residents and, in its most extreme forms, even naturalised citizens or people born in Europe who are deemed “unassimilated”. In the last century, this would have been called “deportation”, a term indelibly associated with Nazism and its concentration camps.
Remigration is the new idea advancing across the EU: ethnic cleansing without having to call it by its name; a rhetorical device for circumventing shame and scandal; a bridge carrying ideas from extremism into the political mainstream.
Europe’s new paradigm: from conservatives to extremists
From Germany, which has become the most advanced political laboratory for remigration, the concept has spread across the rest of the EU. This has happened despite the mass demonstrations against the AfD, which nevertheless secured 16 per cent of the vote in the 2024 European elections, one of its first historic electoral breakthroughs, before continuing to climb Germany’s political rankings and eventually reaching first place, particularly in the east of the country.
The deportation of migrants deemed to be irregularly present in the Union has become a guiding principle of Europe’s new asylum policies, centred on the creation of “return hubs” in third countries, even when those countries are not the countries of origin of the people concerned.
The Albania model, devised by Giorgia Meloni together with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, has become a blueprint at European level. The right to asylum, once protected by the Union and administered within its borders, is now being pushed outside European territory, outsourced to third countries through agreements concluded by national governments. This represents a genuine break with previous European migration policy.
And this is not all. The version of the returns legislation approved by the European Parliament by a right-wing majority stretching from the European People’s Party to the AfD — through Meloni’s Conservatives, Le Pen’s allies and the Patriots associated with Viktor Orbán and Matteo Salvini — pushes this approach even further. It weakens safeguards concerning respect for the rule of law in third countries hosting return hubs and extends detention periods for people awaiting transfer who are deemed not to be cooperating.
A breach in European democracy
The European Union has built its political imagination around the permeability of its internal borders. Remigration introduces the opposite movement. No longer circulation, but an identity-based selection of who is allowed to remain: a shift from citizenship as a right to citizenship as a form of belonging that must be culturally certified.
Recently, at the European Parliament, I had the opportunity to ask Roberto Vannacci about remigration. Vannacci was one of the guests of honour at the Remigration Summit held in Italy in May 2025, which brought together far-right activists and politicians from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Vannacci argued that remigration should apply to anyone who speaks about sharia law in the EU: “They must be expelled.”
It is clear how profoundly such an idea would alter the rule of law in the European Union, reopening questions that had until now appeared settled, at least in theory. Who is European? Who is allowed to stay? Who truly belongs in the EU?
By exploiting precarity and economic crisis, and by tapping into widespread fears in an age of profound uncertainty, the European right is providing its own answers to these questions. And it has succeeded in carrying them far beyond Potsdam and into the homes of Europeans, who appear increasingly less shocked by the slogans that emerged from that freezing day at Villa Adlon.
