Politicians from Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, including a personal aide to its leader Alice Weidel, met the head of the rightwing extremist Identitarian Movement and neo-Nazi activists to discuss a “masterplan” for mass deportations in the event of the party coming to power, it has been reported.
The meeting, which was first reported on Wednesday by the investigative outlet Correctiv, took place last November at a countryside hotel on the outskirts of Potsdam. It is likely to feed a fraught debate over whether the AfD should be banned due to growing concerns that it poses a fundamental threat to German democracy.
Buoyed up by discontent over immigration, the AfD is polling in first place in all five of Germany’s eastern states, three of which are holding elections later this year. While both the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the liberal, pro-business Free Democratic party (FDP) have, for now, ruled out entering coalitions with the party, its presence at the meeting suggests a far-right organisation with its eye on political gains in the near future.
Invitations seen by Correctiv and the Guardian describe the meeting as an opportunity to present “an overall concept in the sense of a masterplan”. The meeting was attended not only by two state and municipal-level AfD politicians but also one active member of the Bundestag, Gerrit Huy, as well as Roland Hartwig, a former MP who has acted as a personal aide to Weidel since September 2022. One party branch of the AfD’s has described Hartwig as being tasked with the party’s “strategic positioning”.
The AfD figures were meeting with Martin Sellner, who was tasked with introducing the “masterplan” and is a key figure in the pan-European “New Right” and who, in 2019, was permanently barred from entering the UK because of his extremist views. The Identitarian Movement, whose Austrian branch Sellner used to lead, openly opposes the idea of multicultural societies and expounds the conspiracy theory of a “great replacement” to replace Europe’s white population with people from Africa and the Middle East.
The Identitarian Movement is on a list of organisations whose membership the AfD considers incompatible with party membership, and the party has denied ties to the movement in the past. However, in recent years the AfD has done little to distance itself from the activist network.
One key idea that Sellner has been trying to nudge into the political mainstream is “re-migration”: the forceful return of migrants to their countries of origin via mass deportations. Such deportations would target not only asylum seekers but, as Sellner elaborated in a recent article for the New Right journal Sezession, also citizens holding German passports who, he claims, “form aggressive, rapidly growing parallel societies”.
According to Correctiv’s account, the explosive subject of “re-migration” apparently dominated the discussions between AfD politicians and rightwing extremist activists, with Sellner allegedly presenting the forcible extradition of “non-assimilated” German citizens as the biggest “challenge” if the AfD were to gain power.
Ideas discussed at the meeting, according to Correctiv, included that of deportations to an unnamed state in northern Africa that would provide space for up to 2 million people. People who lobby on behalf of refugees in Germany could also go there, Sellner is reported to have suggested.
In a statement sent to the Guardian, Sellner confirmed he had presented the idea of “re-migration” at the meeting but said it was not about a “secret masterplan” and his comments had been shortened and taken out of context.
During the meeting, Sellner said, he had made it “unmistakably clear that no distinction can be made between different types of [German] citizens – that there must be no second-class citizens – and that all re-migration measures have to be legal”.
“Remigration also includes not only deportations, but also local assistance, Leitkultur [‘guiding culture’] and pressure to assimilate. The demand is part of an alternative migration and family policy, the aim of which is to control immigration so that it does not exceed Germany’s reception limits.”
Huy, the AfD Bundestag delegate, is reported to have claimed that she developed her own “re-migration” concept, and appeared to suggest her party no longer opposed the government’s plan to lift a ban on dual citizenship for that reason. “Then you can take away the German [citizenship], and they still have one,” she is alleged to have said at the meeting. Currently it is illegal under German law to strip people of citizenship if it means they would then become stateless.
In a phone call with the Guardian, Huy confirmed her attendance of the meeting and that the discussion of “re-migration” was on the agenda. “In 2017, I presented my party association chairman with plans for a re-migration programme for non-German nationals who can’t find their way into the labour market, which were not picked up by the party,” Huy said. “I still stand by those proposals.”
Huy said she could not remember if plans for the removal of German nationals were also part of the discussions at the Potsdam meeting. Her comments on dual citizenship, she said, “were clearly meant as a joke”.
Contacted by Correctiv and the Guardian, neither Weidel nor Hartwig commented on the report. The AfD confirmed that Hartwig had been at the meeting but said the reported proposals were not party policy.
“The AfD won’t change its position on immigration policy because of a single opinion at a non-AfD meeting,” the party told Reuters.
The AfD’s gradual transformation from an economically liberal, anti-euro party into what many believe to be a far-right outfit is not new. In the three eastern states where the party could triumph at elections this year – Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia – the party has been classified as “certified rightwing extremist” by the German domestic spy agency, allowing its covert surveillance and potentially even infiltration. The party, however, denies that it is extremist.
Postwar Germany defines itself as a “militant democracy”, and its constitutional court can shut down political parties if they pursue anti-constitutional goals – and are in a position to achieve these goals. In recent weeks, some politicians, such as the co-leader of Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SDP), have called for a debate about whether the constitutional court should consider such a ban for the AfD.
Others, including the SPD’s federal commissioner for the east, Carsten Schneider, have said that such a move could backfire by further radicalising AfD supporters, especially if the constitutional court were to reject a ban.
In practice, the bar for outright party bans is relatively high. In 2017, Germany’s top constitutional court ruled that even though the radical-right NPD resembled Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, it would not be banned because it did not pose a sufficient threat to democracy.
