Mass expulsion was once a taboo idea in Europe. Then came Maga (FT)
>As Greg Bovino strode towards the stage, the crowd erupted into chants: “USA! USA! USA!” It was late May, several months since Bovino’s ignoble ousting as the greatcoat-clad “commander at large” of US border control.
>But for this audience, Bovino’s record was not a liability. It was his calling card.
>In Figueira da Foz, a sleepy Portuguese beach town just south of Porto, a few hundred of Europe’s most important far-right influencers, decision makers and activists had gathered for the “Remigration Summit”. A gathering to strategise how to expel millions of migrants deemed ethnically “unsuitable” from Europe, by force or encouragement, including those legally settled.
>The Americans — not just Bovino but several dozen, including Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club — were the guests of honour. Remigration, Bovino told his audience, is the defining political issue of our time.
>“I’ll make you a deal, Europe,” he said. “We get this remigration under way full throttle in Europe, I’ll break that trench coat [sic] out, and I’ll wear it on European soil.”
>For Europe’s far-right parties, Donald Trump’s second presidency has brought as many complications as opportunities: his war in Iran, tariffs and threats to seize European territory have proved deeply unpopular, making any open embrace of Maga politically awkward.
>But for the activists pushing remigration, US support in recent months has been transformational.
>The cause they espouse is an ethnonationalist project that seeks to shrink immigrant communities in western countries in the name of restoring cultural homogeneity. At its mildest, it means stricter immigration rules and tougher enforcement. In its most extreme form, it means adopting measures to encourage or even coerce the removal of “unassimilated” legal residents and even naturalised citizens to their countries of “origin”.
>Remigration began as a fringe idea but Trump and his Maga supporters have put it at the centre of their domestic political agenda — and in doing so, have given its European proponents a massive boost.
>A concept that was once too toxic to mention in Europe has become the rallying call for a powerful new movement of young influencers and radicals.
>“What’s happening in the US over the past 18 months is definitely a normalisation of the term — 100 per cent,” said Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist credited with leading the remigration movement.
>Remigration’s journey from Europe to America and back again reveals the depth of the new right’s transatlantic networks. It also shows how US-controlled social media platforms have blurred the line between America’s domestic politics and Europe’s own radical right movements.
>“It’s stuff I didn’t think I would see in my lifetime,” said Bernhard Weidinger, an Austria-based extremism researcher who monitors online narratives. “I am baffled and shocked by how fast things have become sayable and doable [in America] . . . and I think it is a cautionary tale for Europe. It is coming here.”
>What is remarkable, Weidinger said, “is that in many places in Europe [far right] parties are soaring in the polls even as they become more radical”.
>Remigration is at the heart of that shift, he added. Among its proponents, the feeling is that, with the White House behind them, their time has come: “The general sense is that they are winning. And that they are winning big.”
>In November 2023, a year before Trump’s re-election, Sellner laid out his plan for remigration to a select group of far-right influencers and politicians at Villa Adlon, a lakeside neo-baroque residence in Potsdam just outside Berlin.
>Participants discussed measures to remove illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and even non-native residents and “unassimilated” German citizens — including to a “model city” in north Africa, according to media reports. When those reports emerged weeks later, they triggered mass protests and a backlash that reached into the far right.
>Remigration was considered so toxic that even Alternative for Germany (AfD) distanced itself from members who had attended. Two months later, after waves of protests across German cities, Sellner was banned from Germany — though the ban has since been overturned.
>Sellner is the most prominent of Europe’s Identitarians, a movement that began in France two decades ago and later flourished in Austria and Germany — classified as extremist by European domestic security services. The Identitarians have made remigration their rallying cry.
>In the same month that Sellner was banned from Germany, he was also reinstated on X, as part of Elon Musk’s liberalisation of the platform’s rules. Sellner’s return to the site was a pivotal moment: it accelerated remigration’s journey into the US right, where he increasingly presented his thoughts and ideas around the subject in English.
>The backlash to Potsdam ultimately proved counter-productive. Had the meeting gone unnoticed, remigration might have remained a fringe concept. Instead, the outrage helped carry the idea into the Anglosphere.
>Remigration soon entered the lexicon of those involved with Project 2025, the policy plan advocated by the rightwing conservative Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term.
>Stephen Miller, Trump’s soon-to-be deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, wrote on X: “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”
>From there, the term rose quickly through the Trump White House tweetocracy: first Miller, then the Department of Homeland Security, then Trump himself became regular users. “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” the president posted last year.
>Asked on Air Force One days later what he meant, Trump said: “It means get people out of here who are in our country. Get them out. I wanna get them out.”
>In May, just before the Portugal summit he co-organised, Sellner saw the White House’s X account post an image of Trump at a lectern. Underneath, the words “replacement migration” were crossed out. Beneath them, in oversized type, stood: “Remigration”.
>“It’s absolutely been a breakthrough, having the president say this,” said Sellner. “This picture — it could have been an Identitarian graphic,” he said.
>“Having the most powerful man in the world start talking about remigration — that’s definitely a victory. The effects of it will last even after the Trump presidency.”
>Words matter greatly, in Sellner’s view, as much as funding or electoral victories. He sees himself as a “metapolitical” campaigner, constantly pushing the boundaries of what is sayable and doable.
>Across Europe, far-right parliamentary parties are now talking about remigration.
>In Italy, a citizens’ initiative launched in January under the banner “Remigration and Reconquest” gathered more than 150,000 signatures and forced a parliamentary debate.
>In mid-July, Sellner and Dutch political commentator and far-right activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek arrived in Brussels with a wheelbarrow of paper: 500,000 signatures calling for remigration to be registered as a European Citizens’ Initiative, the threshold at which the European Commission must consider a response.
>In Germany, remigration is official AfD policy. In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD is on course to win more than 40 per cent in September’s election, local leaders have promised to begin deportations “from day one”.
>In the UK, the Restore Britain party, which seeks to outflank Nigel Farage from the right, has made it a central theme. Harrison Pitt, Restore’s chief ideologue, has travelled to Vienna to meet Sellner and discuss common ground and tactics.
>In Sellner’s telling, X has become a “LinkedIn for the [far] right” with Musk as their champion. “Anyone who does not support remigration is a traitor,” Musk wrote on X on July 25.
>Once fragmented by language and national politics, Europe’s hardliners are now plugged into a US-led conversation, Sellner said.
>“What happens in America matters . . . it’s consumed, read, internalised by all the young rightwing politicians, influencers and brought into the debate. [Maga] is a huge cultural influence for the new right.”
>In June, Sellner announced a new “Institute for Remigration”, a “think-tank” he wants to become a lobby group for far-right parliamentarians — “a National Rifle Association, but for deportations”, as he puts it.
>Since Bovino’s encouragement in Portugal, Sellner said the movement “made a huge leap” in contacts with American think-tanks and people close to the Washington establishment. “We are in way deeper now.”
>A new transatlantic relationship was being forged, he said, “based not on neoconservatism or Pax Americana . . . but on identitarianism”.
>US campaigning expertise was already professionalising Europe’s far right, he added. Sellner is developing “customer relationship management” software to mobilise what he claimed were about 100,000 pro-remigration activists across Europe.
>For all the noise, however, the route to actual policy remains uncertain. Identitarian rallies have often been met by larger counter-demonstrations, while far-right parties remain wary of alienating the voters they need to reach office.
>In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has been notably reluctant to adopt the language of remigration. She fell out with the AfD over the Adlon villa meeting in 2024 and hasn’t patched up relations since.
>Sellner is unperturbed. Short-term electoral gains and losses, he argues, matter less than shifting the debate before it reaches parliament.
>“It’s already happening. The debate is already shifting in Europe. I don’t really think I have to do anything any more. The ball is rolling.”