Since its foundation in 2013, Germany's far-right AfD party has steadily asserted its increasingly radical stance, although it has never before reached such high levels in terms of voting intentions – 21-23% nationwide, around 30% in the six former East German states, and even 35% in two of them, Saxony and Thuringia, where regional elections will be held on September 1.

But what would the AfD do if it came to power? According to an investigation published on Wednesday, January 10, by the German investigative website Correctiv, on November 25, 2023, several of the AfD's leaders, together with party donors and members of the neo-Nazi movement, met in a Potsdam hotel to discuss a large-scale expulsion plan for Germans of foreign origin.

Presented by Martin Sellner, founder of the Identity Movement Austria and an influential figure on the German-speaking far right, this "remigration" plan would require "tailor-made laws" to "put strong pressure" on "unassimilated German citizens." To be implemented, the plan would require a "model state" in North Africa, where up to two million people could be "relocated", including "people who help refugees in Germany."

According to Correctiv, the AfD leaders who attended the secret meeting, for which a contribution of €5,000 was requested from each participant – around 30 in all – expressed no reservations whatsoever about the project. Among them were Roland Hartwig, former member of the Bundestag and close advisor to AfD co-chair Alice Weidel, Ulrich Siegmund, leader of the AfD MPs in the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, where the intelligence services recently published an alarming report on the threat posed by the party to the "democratic and constitutional order," and Bundestag member Gerrit Huy, who boasted at the meeting that she had already "put the concept of remigration on the table when I joined the AfD seven years ago."

Officially, the AfD's program does not defend the idea of "remigration", a notion dear to the identitarian right. On its website, the far-right party also states that it defends "the rule of law", considers "the German people to be the sum of all those with German citizenship, and takes issue with the idea that there are 'first- and second-class citizens'".

Nevertheless, at its most recent congress, held in Magdeburg (Saxony-Anhalt) in July 2023, the term was used at the podium by Irmhild Bossdorf, who is in ninth place on the AfD's list for the European elections on June 9. During her address to the party delegates, she notably demanded the "remigration of millions," arguing that Germans should be more concerned with "demographic change" than "climate change."

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