Remigration Summit, Piantedosi: 'Don't be afraid of strong ideas

From Elly Schlein to Maurizio Landini, from Nicola Fratoianni to Angelo Bonelli to the singer of the Modena City Ramblers, the organisers of the demonstration against the Remigration Summit took turns on the stage set up in Piazza San Babila to read the articles of the Constitution. Pd secretary Schlein read number 3, dedicated to equality, and then added 'it is always antifascist Italy. Now and always Resistance'.

Vannacci assured that he will continue to fight for this 'and I will take this battle to Brussels with pride and determination because if Europe does not return to protecting its peoples, it has no future'. 'Instead of worrying about having more weapons, more guns, more missile systems,' he added, 'it should remember that its first duty is to protect its own citizens within Europe's borders. What is the point of talking about common defence if we leave our cities in the hands of crime, illegal immigration and chaos?" The League, he assured, 'is there and will continue to fight for a serious, selective and effective repatriation policy, for a Europe that protects and does not sell out, and for an Italy that does not give in to fear but finds pride in its roots'. Vannacci closed his speech by thanking those present and with a criticism of the mayor 'Sala who does not give us a place to do this in Milan'.

Vannacci's video message gave the 'go-ahead' for the start of the initiative that gathers the European extreme right around xenophobic and racist ideologies and is a peculiar gathering. It is not a congress but rather a convention with tickets and crowdfunding possibilities. According to the organisers, the event has been sold out for days. Participants from all over Europe have paid to be there from 49 euros for the basic version to 250 euros for the premium version.

For the holding of the event, the organisers finally opted for Gallarate, in the province of Varese, after a series of hypotheses circulated in recent days because the venue remained shrouded in mystery until the end. The name of the location was in fact announced at dawn on Saturday. Also because the meeting of the ultra-right unleashed a sea of controversy, with the Democratic Party defining it as a 'duty' to ban a meeting 'of racists who glorify hatred and intolerance' and League leader Matteo Salvini replying: 'it's not like we are in the Soviet Union'. A lengthy meeting was also held in the Prefecture with the police due to fears of public order problems, also in light of the counter-demonstrations already announced.

But what are the ideas of the remigrationists? It is a mass forced expulsion from one country to another. The term belongs to the academic lexicon and that of the study of migration flows, but it lost all neutral connotations the moment the Right appropriated it to avoid using the word 'deportation'. In other words, a concept that until recently was not even pronounceable is now becoming more and more mainstream.

The Remigration Summit 2025 is organised by the association 'Action, Culture, Tradition', whose spokesperson is Andrea Ballarati, and was initiated by the well-known Austrian right-wing activist Martin Sellner.

Ballarati, Italian spokesperson of the Remigration summit, 23 years old, is an economics student, former militant of Gioventù Nazionale, the youth section of Fratelli d'Italia, which he then left to join extra-parliamentary political movements. Since 2022, he has been among the founders of the identity association 'Action, Culture, Tradition' in Como, of which he is president. He is said to have proposed Italy as the venue for the conference, to which the xenophobic Austrian activist Martin Sellner, the Dutch far-right politician Eva Vlaardingerbroek and the French National front politician Jean Yves Le Gallou are also invited.

The leader of 'Action, Culture, Tradition' officially rules out mass deportations but calls for a revision of asylum systems and the introduction of voluntary returns in addition to the expulsion of irregular migrants. In his short journey, Ballarati quickly approached Sellner, a young Viennese ideologue of remigration and militant of the Fpo (Austrian ultra-right party), who was expelled to Switzerland and Germany for his links to neo-Nazi movements. At the basis of the remigration theory, of which Ballarati is said to be one of the greatest supporters in Italy, are the theses - pursued by the ultra-right for over ten years - on the threat of ethnic substitution, according to which western civilisation is the victim of a plan organised by the world's powerful who want to replace it with a multi-ethnic or Islamic-inspired society.

Coagulating the mix - made up of conspiracy, no-vax drifts and xenophobic reactions to migration crises - is the concept of 'remigration' first popularized in Sellner's book 'Regime Change from the Right: A Strategic Sketch', published in 2024. According to the author, every single European nation has to defend its 'dominant culture' from globalisation, aiming to expel irregular migrants, asylum seekers, as well as those with regular residence permits and their descendants who do not conform to the so-called 'dominant culture' of the host country, in particular Islamic foreigners seen as the first threat. For those who criticise it, remigration is a soft form of ethnic cleansing, which is becoming less and less soft and is gaining noisy force.