Right-wing extremist expulsion plans: Saxony-Anhalt as a “model country for remigration”?

Martin Sellner was still celebrating on the evening of the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD election success was “a huge victory,” explained the Austrian right-wing extremist. The party is now a people's party and has “cultural hegemony”. Sellner later whispered on his online channel about a “master plan” that existed for Saxony-Anhalt. And it has a name: “Remigration”.

It is the project that the Identitarian thinker has been peddling for years - the plan for a mass deportation of migrants. Now Sellner in Saxony-Anhalt senses his chance to actually implement this on a small scale and is offering the AfD support with a strategy paper. And the party has already formulated a strikingly detailed program for this in its election manifesto.

Sellner only recently founded his own “Institute for Remigration”. Sellner runs the pseudo-think tank together with Philipp Huemer, ex-head of the Vienna Identitarians and most recently worked for the Austrian conspiracy broadcasterAuf1. Sellner registered Magdeburg as the location of the “Institute” at the Stendal District Court. The address he gave was a house project run by the German Identitarians in Chemnitz.

As early as August, Sellner's "Institute" had published a "policy paper" for "Saxony-Anhalt as a model remigration country" - which Huemer promoted on the blog of Götz Kubitschek, also a right-wing extremist thinker and Sellner's friend, one day after the AfD election success. The paper describes measures on how the federal state could become “a showcase for a comprehensive remigration policy”. It goes on to say that there is “considerable scope for this” at the state level.

The paper proposes a separate “State Office for Remigration” that would bundle all deportation tasks and centrally specify restrictive decision-making practices. All existing toleration must be reviewed, central deportation detention centers expanded, and integration projects terminated, according to the paper. Naturalizations should be “strictly examined”, and existing naturalizations should also be examined in “suspected cases” to see whether they were “unlawfully obtained”.

Sellner and Huemer initially left a taz inquiry unanswered as to whether they were in direct contact with the AfD Saxony-Anhalt with this paper. The AfD state leadership also left this open. The fact that there are mutual contacts became apparent as early as November 2023: when Sellner and Saxony-Anhalt's AfD leader Ulrich Siegmund met at the infamous Potsdam “remigration” meeting and gave lectures there. Sellner has also appeared together with AfD parliamentary group leader Oliver Kirchner and traveled to AfD advisor Kubitschek in Saxony-Anhalt several times.

And we also agree on the content. The AfD Saxony-Anhalt also postulated a “deportation and remigration offensive” in its election program and announced a “180 degree turnaround in migration policy”. For this purpose, there will be a “Remigration Office”, a “Remigration Officer” and a “Deportation Task Force”. The party said it wanted to spend 100 million euros to launch the “deportation offensive”. The 1.2 million euros that are set aside for “integration pilots” in the state’s current double budget will be used for “remigration pilots”.

The AfD further explained that people who came from safe third countries - which would be almost all of them - would be refused admission to Saxony-Anhalt. Likewise, people of unclear identity. All other refugees will have their cash or credit cards confiscated. They would be accommodated in central, remote accommodation. They would also be obliged to do community service. They also want to consider converting the central reception center in Stendal into a detention center for deportation.

After the election, AfD leader Siegmund explained how brutal the plan was: when he announced that Saxony-Anhalt would continue to rely on local arms production in the future, as the “remigration and deportation offensive would of course also need appropriate resources”.

There is still no AfD state government, the party is struggling for a parliamentary majority - and so the “remigration project” remains theoretical for the time being. But the political scientist Steven Schäller from the TU Dresden told the taz that if it were to become a government, the AfD could actually implement a turnaround in migration policy at the state level.

Schäller recently analyzed the election programs of all parties in Saxony-Anhalt. All 86 measures announced by the AfD in the area of ​​migration are restrictive and “a significant part” falls within the state's competence, said Schäller. The conversion of the Stendal reception center into a deportation center, the accommodation of refugees, the provision of budgetary resources for expulsions or cuts in integration projects - all of this is possible at the state level. Above all, the AfD could use ministerial instructions to the administration to massively restrict their discretion, for example in the case of toleration or deportations. “Then we would actually experience a fundamentally different migration policy in Saxony-Anhalt,” said Schäller. “The announcements by the AfD and those around them must therefore be taken very seriously.”