Last Saturday, about 600 far-right activists, politicians and social media personalities, including a handful of Irish men, gathered at the Quinta da Salmanha venue in central Portugal.
Behind high-security gates and amid well-trimmed lawns and palm trees, they discussed how to advance the cause of “remigration”, an idea that has become a central tenet of the European hard right in the last three years.
By most definitions, remigration means deporting not just illegal immigrants but all people judged to be unassimilated in western society, including citizens and the children of non-white immigrants.
Critics say it is essentially a sanitised way of describing state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing. The goal of those who gathered in Portugal at the weekend is to introduce the concept into mainstream politics without alienating more moderate voters.
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Mark Malone of the Hope and Courage Collective, which monitors far-right activity in Ireland, said the European movement is “strategically repackaging” remigration “to normalise their demands for ethnic cleansing”.
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According to a research paper published by the group, this is part of a deliberate effort by the far right to sanitise themselves.
Shaved heads and combat boots “have largely been replaced by a more polished, pseudointellectual aesthetic – tailored suits, minimalist branding, and a focus on metapolitics”, it states.
In Ireland, the push for remigration is being led primarily by the National Party, which was founded by Nazi sympathiser Justin Barrett in 2016. Barrett was later ousted and replaced by a younger cohort of far-right activists, led by Patrick Quinlan, a Fingal county councillor and the party’s sole elected representative.
National Party member and prominent social media commentator Keith O’Brien (who goes by the name Keith Woods) attended the event in Portugal, along with the party’s former deputy leader James Reynolds. They joined dozens of activists and elected representatives from across Europe, many of whom have close links to neo-Nazi groups.
The star speaker was Greg Bovino, a former US border patrol official who, before retiring, became the public face of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in US cities.
Bovino was clearly impressed with the gathering. “There’s a movement and it’s starting and I don’t see it stopping,” he told reporters during a coffee break.
Also there was Peadar Mac Aidicín of the National Party’s youth wing. “From my conversations with everyone here so far, it’s clear the main thing that unites Europe is the need for remigration, the repatriation of those not of us,” he said in an online post. “On behalf of the National Party I hope everyone has a great time in Porto.”
In fact, despite the advertising, the conference was not in Porto. On Saturday morning, attendees were bussed from Porto to the venue 140km south, outside the city of Figueira da Foz. This was necessary, one speaker later told attendees, due to threats of “leftist sabotage” in Porto. In the run-up to the event there had been calls for authorities to ban the event.
In Germany, police had prevented far-right activist Maximilian Märkl from boarding a plane to Portugal to attend. To the delight of guests, he later made a surprise appearance, having driven 22 hours from Munich.
It is not clear if any Irish activists were prevented from travelling, although several prominent members of the National Party, who attended similar events in the past, were absent.
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Saturday’s event focused on tactics for spreading the message about remigration to the general population. “There’s a need to establish the concept as a positive one,” said Björn Höcke, leader of the far-right AfD party in Thuringia, Germany, to loud applause.
Märkl, the surprise guest from Munich, appealed to Americans in the audience to help lobby Meta to ensure remigration campaigners are not banned from social media platforms. “I can guarantee a political victory within one month if you can somehow keep us on Facebook and Instagram.”
Other speakers advocated real-world activism rather than social media posting as the only way to “save” their countries.
There was effusive praise for the UK’s Raise the Colours movement, which saw Union flags erected on flagpoles across the country, a movement that was replicated by Irish far-right activists with the Tricolour. A British activist said the flags were put up to say to immigrants “it’s not your country”.
The biggest round of applause was for Martin Sellner from Austria. Once a member of a neo-Nazi group, Sellner is often viewed as the founder of the remigration movement. In reality, it dates back to the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) of the 1960s. However, Sellner has been the leading figure in adapting it for a new audience of disaffected young Europeans.
In 2023, he attended a secret meeting with leading members of the AfD in Potsdam where he presented his plans for remigration of both legal immigrants and “non-assimilated” German citizens, according to reporting from the investigative outlet Correctiv. Sellner and other attendees later denied their plans extended to German citizens.
News of the meeting triggered large anti-extremism protests across Germany and calls for the AfD to be banned.
AfD, now one of the biggest parties in Germany, distanced itself from remigration policies and demanded members stop associating themselves with Sellner.
O’Brien, of the National Party, who is one of the most prominent Irish proponents of remigration, also has close links with AfD. In July last year, AfD politician Fabian Jank welcomed him to the Brandenburg parliament to discuss “a large-scale remigration movement”. The presence of O’Brien, who has a history of making anti-Semitic statements, triggered an internal AfD investigation.
National Party members have taken part in various other international meetings on remigration including gatherings in Oslo, Norway and a “march for remigration” in Leuven, Belgium last year. Also last year, Quinlan and O’Brien travelled to Ghent, Belgium, for a far-right rally headlined by Sellner.
According to Malone, the party “has been collaborating with British and other European far-right groups to shift the boundaries of what feels politically acceptable in Ireland and across Europe”.
“These groups understand that culture and language shape politics long before laws change.”
At home, National Party members have been promoting remigration at every opportunity, with leaflets, banners and speeches. An analysis of social media shows the group first started pushing the concept in 2022, when it tweeted about remigration three times. Last year it mentioned the concept 33 times on X alone.
The National Party has been contacted for comment.
On social media, the party seeks to push right-wing conversations about immigration to new extremes. “Vetted or unvetted, thousands have to go. Remigration now,” is one of its favourite slogans.
In this they are having some success, at least within existing anti-immigration spheres. Several elected county councillors not associated with the party have started pushing remigration, including Gavin Pepper, an Independent councillor for Dublin city known for his anti-immigration rhetoric who has used the hashtag #remigration on social media posts criticising multiculturalism and immigration.
Some on the right, who once viewed remigration as politically toxic, now see it as a viable policy, according to Mark Malone of the Hope and Courage Collective. Two years ago, Eoin Lenihan, an Irish commentator and author of a recent bestselling book criticising Irish immigration policy, criticised the AfD’s acceptance of remigration as a “self-inflicted PR disaster” in a post on X. Earlier this year, Lenihan, who lives in Germany, endorsed the policy.
“The clean-up will necessitate a harder solution. Remigration is the kindest solution. But we saw in the US that with the slightest ‘icky’ optics, many ‘conservatives’ will baulk,” he posted on X last February.
In response to a request for comment, Lenihan said he was not associated with Sellner or the National Party. He criticised those who use “extreme definitions of remigration” and said he has been “the target of frequent attacks by the ethno-nationalist right in Ireland”.
He said he spoke about remigration as “a commentator and journalist” because “it is a conversation happening across the Continent in response to the radical demographic changes occurring across the EU – particularly in harder right and ethno-nationalist circles – which are growing”.
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In Ireland, remigration is still an obscure concept, despite a general increase in anti-immigration sentiment in recent years. There term has never been mentioned in the Dáil and was not a big topic of debate in any of the recent elections.
The only exception was AJ Cahill, a candidate for the far-right Irish People party in the recent Galway West byelection. In an interview in May, he called for “remigration at scale. We can’t live with these cultures, we can’t live with these people.” Cahill got 1.9 per cent of first-preference votes.
Elsewhere in Europe, remigration proponents have been much more successful. The largest party in Austria, the far-right Freedom Party, called for a “remigration commissioner” at EU level during the 2024 election. During the 2022 French presidential election, candidate Éric Zemmour of the Reconquête party pushed for a “ministry of remigration” to deport at least 100,000 immigrants each year.
The movement’s greatest success came last year when the Trump administration began using the term. This is more than just rhetoric. Last year the US state department set up an office of remigration for the purpose of encouraging huge numbers of immigrants to leave the country.
