Meeting Tommy Robinson earlier this month, the French anti-immigration politician Éric Zemmour bluntly summed up his mission: “Politics needs to defeat demographics.” Given rising numbers of Muslims, he said, there was perhaps “10 to 20 years” left to save Europe from “disappearing”. Both men placed their hopes in one policy to reverse the “invasion”: remigration.

At root, remigration means using mass deportations in order to curtail minority – especially Muslim – populations. In France’s 2022 presidential election, Zemmour pledged the creation of a “ministry of remigration” meant to remove “1 million” people, targeting undocumented and dual-national criminals. In practice, supporters of the idea often blur distinctions between criminals and non-criminals, longer-standing citizens and recent migrants, the undocumented and those with settled status.

The rising remigration discourse needs to be understood in the context of the far right’s electoral march across Europe. Once in power, or close to it, parties from Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) have been accused of going soft by the more extreme fringes of the right. (After all, even liberal media often suggest that their leaders have deradicalised, becoming more like traditional conservatives.) The more extreme right then ups the ante, popularising drastic and inhumane ideas – like remigration.

While this might suggest a profound split running through Europe’s rightwing forces, the truth is that even talking about remigration is a sign that the far right – in its more extreme and “mainstream” variants – is winning.

The call for remigration has spread far beyond small extremist circles. In Germany, it was embraced ahead of last........

© The Guardian