Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) organised a covert meeting in November 2023 in Potsdam which featured the leader of the far-right Identitarian Movement,1 Martin Sellner. This meeting has sparked outrage over the AfD’s remigration agenda, referred to as a ‘masterplan’.2 This meeting was attended by three key figures within AfD—Ulrich Siegmund (Parliamentry Group Leader for Saxony-Anhalt), Tim Krause (Chair of the District Party in Potsdam and AfD Spokesperson) and Roland Hartwig (former aid to Alice Weidel, co-leader of AfD). They debated on ways to remigrate or forcefully deport those individuals to an unnamed country in Africa, who in their opinion failed to assimilate, had non-German lineage or demonstrated support for asylum seekers.
The attendees are adherents of a conspiracy theory commonly known as the Great Replacement, as per which there is a deliberate attempt to replace the White European population with migrants of colour, thereby altering the racial demography for good. While Remigration, a sociological term, refers to a voluntary migration of people back to their homelands, the far-right extremists, White supremacists, and conspiracy theorists have promoted a pejorative understanding of the subject. They have manipulated the term and endorsed it as a forced migration or deportation of non-members—migrants, asylum seekers, and their families.3 Remigration, a term considered anti-Islam and xenophobic by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has been integral to AfD’s political agenda on social media platforms and in public speeches, where it has previously spoken about ‘a national and a supranational remigration agenda’.4
After the discussions at the meeting were exposed by a non-profit newsroom, they have been termed as a ‘smear campaign’ by the Left and reminiscent of the tactics adopted by the Stasi.5 Nevertheless, AfD’s extremist rhetoric and support for mass expulsion within parliamentary halls,6 while having polled second nationally in an opinion poll conducted by YouGov (a global public opinion and data company),7 indicates that should Germany take a hard tilt towards the far-right like Italy, Hungary, and Sweden, the party would use all means, including constitutional, to undermine the Basic Law enshrined in the constitution which prohibits discrimination against Germans regardless of their race, nationality or religion. It was instituted in May 1949 following the racially discriminative policies that defined Adolf Hitler’s reign throughout the Third Reich and culminated in the Second World War.
While deciding not to expel individuals like Tim Krause, an AfD spokesperson and an attendee at the Potsdam meeting, lawmakers such as Hans-Christopher Berndt (leader of AfD’s Parliamentary Group in the Brandenburg State Parliament) have gone as far as to argue that ‘Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise.’8........