"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The recent ‘remigration’ summit of neo-Nazi and assorted far right extremists in Northern Italy was the latest example of the normalization of a conspiracy theory that has its roots in Hitler’s Germany.
For almost a century, right-wing extremists have been trying to introduce their conspiracist ideas into popular discourse. Through a number of central concepts, they want to dominate and distort political discussion and public opinion. ‘Umvolkung', a term used by the Nazis for the ‘re-Germanization’ of the diverse populations of Eastern Europe, has more recently been repackaged as ‘The Great Replacement’. The notion is taken from the title of French author Renaud Camus’ 2011 book. In the view of its adherents there is an evil global elite, often linked to international institutions, freemasonry, Judaism, Zionism, communism or the banking world, bent on destroying white Christian Western civilisation through programs of immigration of Muslim and non-white populations.
To make their ideas more palpable the nationalist and nativist far right movement came up with the more sympathetic sounding word ‘remigration’ in response to the so called colonization of Europe and the required defense of the ‘white natives’ of the continent against ‘invaders’. Under this schema, remigration of all ‘foreigners’ is needed - even third generation ones if they have not ‘assimilated’ - as the only solution to avoid the extinction of Western civilization.
For a long time, remigration advocates were only active on the margins of society, however with the rise of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and an array of extreme right political parties across Europe they are rapidly gaining influence. At its core, remigration is a conspiracy fantasy promoted by a cast of nefarious and even criminal characters, that could have catastrophic consequences for universal human rights and liberal democracy.
In Potsdam, Germany, in November 2023 a notorious secret gathering of German-speaking political parties including the officially designated extremist and far right German AfD (Alternative for Germany), the right wing conservative CDU (Christian Democratic Union), and the populist far right Austrian ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party) took place. The meetings provided a platform for remigration to take centre stage in public discussion in Germany for weeks. Massive counter-demonstrations against the AfD ensued and the term became a central element in the party's political terminology.
Alice Weidel, leader of the AfD adopted it as one of the main slogans in her electoral campaign.
“Milan was the Italian Potsdam”. Thus wrote with great satisfaction, the German identitarian conspiracy theorist Martin Sellner, after the most recent ‘remigration conference’ in Italy on May 17, 2025. The gathering of around 300 mostly young men in their twenties in Gallarate (Varese) near the northern Italian city of Milan, was the scene of huge demonstrations.
Sellner’s strategy to push remigration as a mainstream concept is bearing fruit in Italy since the far right party Lega (the Northern League) came on board and backed extremists like him and his Flemish friend Van Langenhove. Both have a long history in neo-Nazi circles.
The mayor of Gallarete is a member of Lega and said holding the conference was an issue of freedom of speech. Participants included leading figures on the extreme right in Europe and the United States, associated with political parties like the Italian Lega, the German AfD, the French Reconquête (Reconquest party founded by Eric Zemmour), the Flemish Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) and the Dutch Forum voor Democratie (Forum for Democracy).
The Danish-Swedish anti-islam extremist Rasmus Paludan from Stram Kurs (Hard Line) was prevented from attending the conference by the Italian police. He is best known for setting fire to a copy of the Quran.
Sellner developed the concept in his 2024 book titled Remigration pushing a return of all non-European people to their ‘homelands’. A known figure on the global hard right, Sellner was convicted for putting stickers with swastikas on a synagogue in Baden, near Vienna in 2006, when he was 17. His accomplice told police that they wanted “to do something” to protest the latest conviction of Holocaust denier David Irving. Sellner says it was a sin of youth and that regardless he was exercising his freedom of speech.
He later corresponded with Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch mass killer who gunned down 51 people in a mosque in 2019. Tarrant donated money to the organization of Sellner. Because of his connections with the terrorist Sellner was investigated by Austrian police. He is banned from several countries because of his right wing extremist activism.
Sellner is married to Brittany Pettibone, a known peddler of conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. There was quite some upheaval following reports that Sellner had held secret meetings in Potsdam in November 2023 with members of the AfD and CDU. Sellner not only pleads for a ‘remigration’ of millions of people, but he also states that Germany needs a new perspective on its history. The memory of the Holocaust has to be made into something secondary.
Another speaker at the 2025 remigration summit in Italy was the former Flemish MP of Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) Party Dries Van Langenhove, currently on trial for Holocaust negationism and racism. Van Langenhove is also a leader of the paramilitary group Schild en vrienden (Shield and Friends). A Ghent court sentenced him to a 1-year prison term and an effective fine of 16,000 euros for racism and negationism law violations in March 2024. He is also deprived of his rights (including the right to hold public offices, offices or positions and the right to be elected) for the maximum term of 10 years.
For selling or offering prohibited weapons for sale, Van Langenhove was sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment with suspension and an effective fine of €8,000. Van Langenhove appealed the decision of the court and the verdict is due for June 13, 2025. It all started in 2018 when a report was broadcasted by Pano, an investigative journalism team from Flemish public television. The report clearly showed the Jekyll and Hyde approach adopted by the group: one public, presentable and moderate face; and the other private, fiercely antisemitic and neo-Nazi. In confidential chats, repeated praise appeared for the Oslo far right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who was considered a true role model. In a speech for the US far right hate group American Renaissance he said that he was proud of the Flemish volunteers in the Waffen SS who fought Stalin in World War II.
“Survival of our people” should be the only guideline in politics, he declared in his speech outlining how remigration can be implemented using existing laws. Van Langenhove claimed there is a battle going on for the soul and future of Europe that is being threatened by large groups of newcomers of a different ethnicity. If Europeans do not become aware of this threat, their culture will disappear in the foreseeable future, he went on. Furthermore, there is an evil globalist elite bent on undermining Europe's ethno-cultural identity and remigration is the answer to this politics of the Great Replacement; laws and treaties that hinder remigration must be changed; no more refugees should be admitted; borders should be hermetically sealed; and the status of refugees already present must be reviewed and family reunification abolished. A special target of Van Langenhove’s fury are European laws against discrimination and hate speech that he claims infringe on freedom of expression, which he says is an absolute right. This unlimited ‘freedom’ impinging on the rights of others also includes the ‘freedom’ to mock or question the Holocaust in his opinion.
One of the more shadowy attendees at the conference was Freek Jansen, right-hand man and bosom buddy of the Netherlands far right nationalist party Forum for Democracy (FvD) leader Thierry Baudet. In 2017 Jansen organised a meeting with white supremacist Jared Taylor and Fausto Lanser, boss of the Dutch neo-nazi group Erkenbrand. A 2018 Dutch intelligence report explained their worldview:
“In Erkenbrand's ideology, race is central. Erkenbrand is explicitly against racial mixing and strives for a white ethnostate. This society mainly targets men. According to Erkenbrand, white men must realize that their position is in danger. The goal is to arrive at a sufficient critical mass that agrees with these ideas, so that the change to an ethnostate can be initiated. In this purely white ethnostate, there is no room for other races. In addition, in Erkenbrand's worldview, Jews also fall outside the white ethnostate.”
Jansen wrote the infamous ‘Boreal’ speech that alarmed more moderate members about the course Baudet wanted to take after the FvD’s spectacular election victory in 2019. Boreal is a code word in neo-Nazi circles for white supremacy. During internal squabbles surrounding the youth organisation’s Whatsapp messages in which racist, antisemitic and misogynist memes and texts were circulated internally, it became clear that he was the instigator of much of this communication. Jansen regretted that the Third Reich lost the war and praised its economic policies in the 1930s. Jansen has long known Van Langenhove, with whom he shared a room during a summer camp at Sterkenburg Castle in 2018. Jansen dabbles in a mythical Germanic past. Articles on Julius Evola and Aleksandr Dugin appeared in the FvD youth wing’s magazine De Dissident.
General Roberto Vannacci, a member of the European Parliament for the Lega, sent a video, apologizing for not being able to attend the conference because he was at Pro-Life and Family conference in Luca. “You have my support,” he said, adding that “remigration is not a slogan but a concrete proposal. It means putting Italians, Europeans at the center. It is a battle for freedom and civilization, for security, which is the true watershed between right and left.”
Vannacci has a long history of homophobic, racist and sexist incidents. He also believes that Mussolini was a statesman like other historical figures such as Italian reunification notable the Count of Cavour.
On 12 January, 2025 in an interview with the daily Il Tempo, Vannacci was asked whether Alice Weidel's statement that Hitler was left wing was just a provocation or whether it had some historical basis. “I don't know, one thing is certain: the party founded by Hitler was called National Socialism so on the fact that it was based on socialism there are few doubts,” he replied. The same idea was repeated on January 15, 2025 on Italian television when Vannacci said that “Hitler founded a party, which was called ‘national socialism’, so it is clear that the reference is socialism”.
Another member of the European parliament of the Lega was also present. According to Isabella Tovaglieri the West is in “inexorable decline,” threatened “by the advance of fundamentalist Islam,” a dystopian fate that she claimed the Italian left itself has favored. Indeed, it is the European Union itself that has embraced “radical Islam, promoting Islam and its customs as a ‘European model’.” It is a true colonization: in fifteen years, the Muslim population in Europe is destined to double. If we do not reverse course, Islam will conquer Europe.” This future of Islamization is called, in short, Eurabia. This blurring of the distinction between radical political Islamism and Islam as a religion or Muslims more broadly, casting aspersions on all Muslims as somehow radical conquerors, is a popular conspiracy fantasy that was championed in Italy by the writer Oriana Fallaci. It was originally introduced by the British author Bat Ye’or (pseudonym of Gisèle Littman). According to Tovaglieri, women are especially targeted by foreign gangs.
The first to introduce the concept of remigration in Italy was Alessandro Corbetta, leader of the Leghist group in the regional council of Lombardy. “It is essential to start seriously discussing remigration,’ he wrote on Facebook on 2 January 2025. “That is, the repatriation of illegal immigrants and criminals to their countries of origin, but also of those foreigners who deliberately choose not to want to integrate.”
An important role in the organisation of the conference was played by the network's Italian contact. Andrea Ballarati is still very young, yet has several years of experience in the far-right milieu. He was active in the youth movement of Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), Giorgia Meloni's party born out of post-war neo-fascism. This youth organisation was compromised last year by an undercover report by Fanpage. Prominent identities were found to be holding behind-the-scenes paeans to the Duce and 1970s neo fascist terrorists. Later, Ballarati threw himself into his own militant identitarian association called Azione, Cultura, Tradizione (Action, Culture, Tradition).
The Dutch influencer started her speech at the northern Italy ‘remigration’ conference by saying that the spectrum of respectable discourse, or Overton’s window, has already shifted considerably to the right in recent years, but in her opinion not quite far enough yet. She largely repeated the message she also expressed earlier at the Conservative Political Action Committee event (CPAC) in Budapest including that: we are on the eve of the downfall of Western, white and Christian civilization, which is threatened by criminal hordes of colored foreigners from outside Europe; the Great Replacement is approaching with great strides and only remigration of millions of foreigners can avert the impending genocide; but for that to happen, an end must come to the left-wing dictatorship that oppresses true patriots. All international treaties on refugees must therefore also be abolished, along with the United Nations and civil society groups. The alternative is a homogeneous white and Christian Europe, in which the traditional values of family and faith are central. Non-white Europeans must be “repatriated” to their own “homeland”. She said that Africa is meant for Africans, but it is unlikely that she means that white South Africans should leave their country. Consistency has never been a trademark of the extreme right.
Vlaardingerbroek believes that Europeans should no longer feel guilty about the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. They should instead be proud of their beautiful civilization and produce more children in the demographic arms race with other “ethno-groups”. As she previously told CPAC in Budapest, Vlaardingerbroek claimed we do not need any statistics or scientific research to be aware of the Great Replacement, but only have to look around the big cities of Europe. Vlaardingerbroek is part of a global new right network that 'looks after' its members, helping each other and boosting social media posts to go viral. Her messages are especially pushed on X by Elon Musk.
The éminence grise of the Nouvelle Droite was also present among the mostly young audience. Le Gallou rode his hobbyhorse of ethnopluralism, asserting once more that Europeans are threatened by foreign peoples who want to subjugate them. He spoke about protecting indigenous peoples and wondered why this should not apply to Europeans. It was a total reversal of reality only intended to invoke fear and resentment. Le Gallou is married to Anne-Laure Blanc, the daughter of Robert Blanc, a veteran of the French Waffen SS division Charlemagne. “Jean-Yves Le Gallou is a hyperactive member of the radical far right. A tenor of the movement who speaks with (almost) all the sensibilities, even the most extreme,” wrote Maxime Macé and Pierre Plottu in a portrait of Le Gallou. He is nowadays an important advisor of Eric Zemmour, leader of the far right political party Reconquête. Zemmour is known for his historical revisionism and in April 2025 he was convicted for contesting crimes against humanity and fined €10,000 for insisting despite all evidence to the contrary that Vichy France World War II leader Marshal Pétain had saved French Jews. Le Gallou leads the Institute Iliade, an identitarian think tank.
If Sellner had wanted to prevent this conference from being associated with neo-Nazism, he had better broken off his connection to Junge Tat, the Swiss ‘Youth Action’ organisation led by two convicted neonazis. Junge Tat has connections to the international skinhead organization Blood and Honour and even some overlapping members. But then again, Sellner has been in touch with them for a long time already. They were part of Action Radar Europe, an organisation founded in 2023 to promote ‘remigration’ The leaders of the group are Manuel Corchia and Tobias Lingg. Corchia in particular stands out for his radicalism. He flirts with National Socialism, reads out long texts by American neo-Nazi James Mason and distributes Brenton Tarrant's manifesto on Telegram. He calls for the preparation of racial warfare and hoards firearms. Corchia is possessed of the delusion that a Jewish elite wants to replace the white population. Both leaders have been convicted of racism. Junge Tat took care of security at the conference and jokingly called themselves the Swiss guard.
As the ‘remigration’ pow-wow near Milan and the extensive coverage it received have demonstrated, the racist and antisemitic, and anti-Muslim hate conspiracies of the identitarian international are becoming increasingly accepted. The once-strong firewall between the far right, with its overt links and sympathies with neo-Nazism, and the democratic right is rapidly crumbling. The identitarians have announced a new conference for next year. Their ideology is a direct and conspiracist attack on historical facts and the principles and achievements of the democratic rule of law that have long been considered untouchable in the West.
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