Remigration Includes You

On the Iranians cheering Europe’s far right, the word sitting in its manifesto, and the people that word names

Iranians demonstrating outside the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 17 February 2024. One placard reads ‘Die AfD ist keine Alternative für Deutschland – AFD Wählen ist so 1933’; the Persian placards call for the end of the Islamic Republic. Photograph: conceptphoto.info, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

On Sunday the Alternative für Deutschland took 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double the Christian Democrats’ share and the strongest result a far-right party has recorded in a German state election since the Nazi period. On 13 September Sweden votes, with the Sweden Democrats already the second party in the Riksdag and already holding up the government. On 20 September Mecklenburg-Vorpommern votes, with the AfD averaging just under 36 per cent and ahead of every rival. And across my timeline, from Cologne and Stockholm and Toronto, Iranians are congratulating them.

The reasoning is never hidden. These are the people who are hard on Islam. They will finish the mullahs. They are, at last, on our side.

Read the Manifesto

Nobody has to guess. The AfD’s programme in Saxony-Anhalt calls for the immediate deportation of irregular migrants, expanded mass detention, and the return of non-ethnic-German citizens to their countries of origin. The word for it is remigration. It entered German politics through Martin Sellner’s presentation at a private meeting near Potsdam in November 2023, and it does not stop at the undocumented. It reaches passport holders judged unassimilated: people who are legally European and, in the movement’s own arithmetic, not native, which means not white and not Christian.

Austria’s Freedom Party campaigns on it. Chega, Vox and Reform UK press against the constitutional articles written after 1945 for the express purpose of stopping citizenship being stripped on political grounds. In May, more than five hundred activists met in Portugal for a Remigration Summit whose guests included the editor of an American white-supremacist magazine.

An Iranian with a German passport, a Persian name and a mosque at the end of the road is not standing outside that category. He is the category.

They Have Already Told You

Test it against Iran, since Iran is the reason given. When the bombing began, Nigel Farage said that Iranians fleeing it should be housed in the Middle East and not in Britain. The AfD’s lead candidate in Baden-Württemberg said the war had to be weighed against whether Germany would face new migration flows. Neither offered a syllable about the mullahs. The concern was arrivals, and the arrivals were us.

They were not being coy. They were answering the question the diaspora will not put to itself: what, exactly, do you imagine you are to them?

Belonging on Loan

I do not think this is stupidity. It is a bid for membership. To be the immigrant who agrees about immigrants is to be, for one evening, inside the room. And the bid is placed by people standing well outside the political traditions they are endorsing, who have never sat through a German or a Swedish argument about who counts, and who therefore mistake a sentence about Islam for a sentence about Tehran.

I wrote in July about Iranians abroad reaching for 1945 and demanding somebody else’s ending for their own country. This is the same manoeuvre at closer range, and it costs more. That was a borrowed history. This is a borrowed politics, and the borrowing comes with a bill.

The Other Placard

In February 2024 a group of Iranians stood outside the Alte Oper in Frankfurt holding two kinds of sign. One said that voting AfD is so 1933. The other, in Persian, demanded the end of the Islamic Republic. Both were raised in the same square, by the same people, on the same afternoon, and nothing in either one contradicted the other.

That is the argument, and it was made two years ago without my help. Nothing in opposing the Islamic Republic requires you to hand your citizenship to people who have written down what they intend to do with it. You can be against Tehran and against Magdeburg on the same morning. It takes no courage at all. It takes only the discipline to finish the sentence, and to read who else is standing in it.