.jpg)
On May 13, the White House’s X account posted a photo of President Donald Trump accompanied by the crossed-out text “Replacement Migration” and, below it, “Remigration”. Less than a month earlier, on April 18, European radical-right leaders, including Jordan Bardella, Pedro Abascal, Andrej Babiš, and Geert Wilders, gathered in Milan at the rally organised by Matteo Salvini’s Lega. One year before, the Remigration Summit took place near Milan, drawing in the main exponents of European Identitarians and extreme-right groups. These three episodes exemplify how fast a concept once confined to fringe nationalist groups is now being debated in mainstream political arenas. Today, “remigration” has indeed become increasingly visible in European political debate and is widely discussed in public opinion. However, to understand how this could happen – and why it matters – it is crucial to examine the relationship between remigration and the conspiracy theory it was built to serve: the Great Replacement.
The Great Replacement Theory
French author Renaud Camus popularised the Great Replacement theory in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement. Its core claim argues that European populations – implicitly white and Christian – are being deliberately replaced by migrants from North Africa and the Middle East through elite-driven demographic engineering. Other related narratives – such as the White Genocide theory in the United States or the Eurabia thesis – share the same underlying logic: migration is an existential threat, birth rates are the real battleground, and cultural erasure will be inevitable if nothing is done.
Like most conspiracy theories, the Great Replacement reduces complex social realities to a simple and emotionally charged story. In this regard, immigration policy, demographic change, and multiculturalism are all collapsed into a narrative of cultural erasure and population replacement. Particularly powerful within this narrative is the representation of white women and children as endangered by migrant men, so that this framing transforms demographic anxiety into a moral and political call to action. Accordingly, versions of this narrative also appeared in the manifestos of white supremacist terrorists such as Anders Behring Breivik in 2011 and Brenton Tarrant in 2019.
This Is Where Remigration Comes into Play
If the Great Replacement is the diagnosis, remigration is the remedy. Martin Sellner – one of its chief ideologues and a leading figure in the pan-European Identitarian movement – presents remigration as “a political strategy to reverse the mass immigration of recent decades in Western Europe – planned, legally grounded, and phased”. In more detail, Sellner’s programme targets three overlapping groups: undocumented migrants, legal non-citizens, and naturalised citizens deemed insufficiently ‘assimilated’. For each group, Sellner proposes a corresponding policy phase, from immediate deportation to long-term ‘restoration’. Despite being framed in seemingly neutral terms, the underlying logic of remigration has been described as “a non-violent form of ethnic cleansing”.
This relationship gets most consistently missed in public debate: remigration is not an independent migration policy proposal. In the original formulation given by Identitarians and extreme-right groups, it not only implies expulsion and repatriation of irregular migrants or those with serious criminal records, but also that of individuals arbitrarily labelled as not sufficiently assimilated. On this point, Sellner clearly points out that remigration is “the necessary reaction to decades of replacement migration (…) to restore harmony, stability, and trust in our society”. The Great Replacement and remigration are thus structurally inseparable: one provides the narrative of a collective threat, the other provides its institutional solution.
The Power of Sanitized Language
How, then, did remigration move from extremist fringe milieus into mainstream political debate, despite its connection to the Great Replacement? The answer lies in a linguistic transformation: over the last decade, far-right actors have increasingly reframed demographic anxieties through a more sanitised and politically acceptable vocabulary, allowing previously marginal ideas to circulate more easily within mainstream public discourse. As a result, concerns about ‘integration failure’, warnings of a ‘demographic winter’, calls for ‘identity preservation’, and proposals for ‘voluntary return’ all function as a politically acceptable vocabulary that carries the same underlying logic of the Great Replacement, but sanitised and framed as ‘common sense’. Part of this language’s effectiveness lies in its ambiguity: it allows actors to invoke fears of demographic and cultural decline without explicitly endorsing conspiracy theories or biological racism. Indeed, unlike previous forms of biological racism, contemporary far-right (and especially radical-right) discourse increasingly frames exclusion through the language of cultural incompatibility, integration, welfare chauvinism, and security concerns. By so doing, far-right actors have managed to repackage racial logics in more socially and politically acceptable forms.
By operating in this blurred space, remigration allows parties to signal alignment with a radical demographic worldview while maintaining plausible deniability about the conspiracy theory underpinning it. By so doing, the mainstreaming has been slow but steady. Éric Zemmour’s party Reconquête proposed a dedicated Ministry of Remigration during the 2022 French presidential campaign, while Alternative für Deutschland has made the term a staple of its public discourse through sensationalistic initiatives. Additionally, the wide echo the Remigration Summit 2025 received in mainstream media contributed to extending the concept’s reach while keeping its meaning ambiguous enough to be interpreted differently by various audiences. This ambiguity is central to remigration’s political utility. Indeed, for audiences already immersed in Great Replacement narratives (i.e., close to Identitarian or extreme-right tropes), the term signals ideological continuity. For more moderate audiences (i.e., radical-right voters and part of the mainstream-right electoral basis), however, it can be reframed as a narrower law-and-order proposal focused on irregular migration or criminality. Consequently, the same word can take on different meanings depending on the context, giving it a broader scope than the explicit theory could ever have. This ambivalent meaning of the term remigration is well exemplified by the different expressions and articulations that extreme and radical-right actors made of this project: the former kept the strict form of Sellner’s plan, the latter blurred the boundaries between remigration, expulsion, and repatriation.
Why Treating These Terms Together Matters
Treating the Great Replacement and remigration as distinct phenomena – one a conspiracy theory, the other a policy proposal – is precisely the misreading that allows the latter to gain ground and legitimacy. As discussed above, sanitised language does not imply the rejection of the underlying, exclusionary, and reactionary ideology. This aspect matters for how we analyse and respond to the growing influence of the far right. Arguments that were once openly supremacist or racist are now reformulated in the language of governance, demography, and national security and depicted as ‘common sense’ policies, thus shifting the Overton window increasingly to the right.
We then must keep in mind that when remigration enters a radical-right – or even a mainstream-right – party, it explicitly or implicitly carries with it the framework of demographic emergency established by the Great Replacement. Recognising this connection does not mean automatically treating every politician who uses the term as a white nationalist. Rather, it means being precise about what these concepts really mean and about their cultural and political backgrounds. Therefore, their gradual normalisation deserves constant critical attention, as the question, ultimately, is not only whether remigration becomes politically normalised, but what happens to democratic boundaries when conspiracy narratives are gradually translated into the language of public policy.
