AfD lawmaker, Young Republican leader headline 'remigration' summit with convicted Holocaust denier
Europe's leading far-right extremists are gathering to promote what critics say is a plan for "ethnic cleansing."
A lawmaker from Germany's Alternative für Deutschland and the president of the New York Young Republican Club are set to appear at a conference on “remigration" alongside some of Europe’s most prominent right-wing extremists, among them: a Belgian Holocaust denier, a Swiss neo-Nazi and an Austrian activist best known for promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
In a 16 May announcement shared on Telegram, organizers of “Remigration Summit 2026” said that the AfD's Lena Kotré would be one of the featured speakers at the May 30 conference in Porto, Portugal. Kotré also spoke at "Remigration Summit 2025" in Milan, Italy.
Kotré has served in the Brandenburg state parliament since 2019. The 38-year-old lawmaker has previously invited controversy by campaigning with far-right extremists. In 2024, the German media outlet Correctiv revealed that she had met in Zurich with members of the neo-Nazi group “Junge Tat” to discuss ”remigration.”
“Remigration” is a far-right term — recently embraced by the Trump administration — that ostensibly has a range of meanings, from the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants from the United States and Europe to the more extreme: the removal of all non-white citizens with foreign ancestry. It is often paired with the historically antisemitic conspiracy theory that global elites are seeking to eliminate or “replace” the white race via mass migration.
“Germany wants Remigration - the AfD promises to deliver!” the conference announcement states. “Nobody fights harder for this than Lena Kotré, the remigration policy spokesperson of AfD Brandenburg.”
In a May 23 post, organizers also announced that Stefano Forte, “president of the famous New York Young Republicans’ Club, will join us from the United States to spread the message of remigration.” Forte has previously forged ties with Europe's far-right, speaking at an AfD event this past March. As The Guardian previously reported, about 20 AfD lawmakers also attended the first gala that Forte hosted as head of the NYYRC in December 2025.
Last year, Forte garnered media attention for saying his group would support an unconstitutional third term for President Donald Trump; in April, Fox News featured him as a “GOP leader” and savage critic of New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
“A fierce advocate for our Western civilization, Stefano and his influential club have built a network around the world that will one day be crucial in defeating the globalists,” states the post announcing his appearance.
Both Kotré and Forte shared the announcements on their personal Instagram pages. Kotré also posted a video encouraging her followers to attend. “Come with me to Portugal,” she says in German, describing the event as a chance to “network and be part of a major European movement for remigration.”
The video, posted May 26, includes a text description of the event in English: “Shaping the future of Europe and the West through sovereignty, identity, and demographic renewal.”
The presence of an elected AfD politician and a Republican operative speaks to how the once-fringe concept of remigration, and the extremists pushing it, have gone mainstream.
“It was popularized by neo-Nazi activists,” Daniel Sharp, an expert on immigration and far-right politics at the University of Vienna, told The Redoubt. “The core idea is to rid Western societies of people of color and Muslims — to ethnically cleanse Europe,” with no regard to legal status. Some who use the term, Sharp added, “explicitly harken back to the Nazi plan to deport Jews to Madagascar.”
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Representatives for the AfD and NYYRC did not respond to requests for comment. Such extremist views are publicly rejected by leaders of their respective parties, but organizers of the Porto summit have indeed linked their politics to Nazi ideology.
Afonso Gonçalves is a headliner and appears to be the lead organizer of the summit. Advertising on Facebook and Instagram indicates that the event has been promoted by the group he founded in 2023, Reconquista, a reference to the historic expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian peninsula. Meta’s Ad Library identifies the summit promotions as paid for by Daniela Palma, who is listed in records as the legal operator of Reconquista’s website.
The group styles itself as a defender of “ethno-cultural Portuguese identity.” But the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a monitoring group, describes Gonçalves as a “white supremacist and misogynist who fashions himself as an authoritarian leader,” noting his claim that “women should not have political rights” and that cities such as London are undergoing “Africanization” in the service of “population replacement.”
In a 2024 post on X, Gonçalves wrote that “Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions,” referring to the rise of Nazi Germany.
Meta did not respond to requests for comment.
Other announced speakers at the summit include Dries Van Langenhove, a Belgian activist who in 2024 was sentenced to one year in prison for inciting violence and denying the Holocaust. Van Langenhove had been revealed as the administrator of group chats in which members of his far-right youth movement, Schild & Vrienden, had shared antisemitic jokes and memes denying the mass murder of Jews in World War II.
“The defendant raved about Nazi ideology,” Judge Jan Van den Berghe said, adding that Van Langenhove “wants to undermine democratic society and replace it with a social model of white supremacy.”
In one message that Van Langenhove posted in a Discord chat, he suggested blood may need to be shed to defeat the political left. “The day of violence is yet to come,” he wrote. “I know which side will be prepared for it and which won’t.”
Van Langenhove’s conviction was upheld last year. In a "very sad announcement" posted May 26 on X, Van Langenhove revealed that he had also "just been convicted a second time for 'hate speech,'" over a 2024 address to a gathering of right-wing students at KU Leuven, a Catholic university.
As Belgian public broadcaster VRT NWS reported, Van Langenhove — in an address that was supposed to be about regenerative agriculture — repeatedly stated that "black Africans" were inferior to "white Flemish" citizens; that Roma women are thieves; and blamed mass migration for crime. KU Leuven lodged a criminal complaint, accusing the activist of seeking to "incite racism" in violation of "the core values of the university."
"Given the fact that I have another court case coming up in September and that I have a dozen active criminal investigations for hate speech, time is running out for me," Van Langenhove wrote in an appeal for donations.
Also speaking at the summit: Manuel Corchia, leader of the Swiss neo-Nazi group “Junge Tat" — the organization that the AfD's Kotré met with last year.
Corchia appears in several videos promoting the event, at least one alongside Reconquista's Gonçalves. In an interview posted this past February on YouTube, Corchia described himself as going down an extremist “rabbit hole” in college, starting with videos from the far-right influencer “Schlomo Finkelstein” before getting into “the old right in Europe,” which he described as a “National Socialistic thing.”
As an art student at Zurich University, the Swiss newspaper WOZ Die Wochenzeitung reported that Corchia and other colleagues logged into online lectures the day of Adolf Hitler’s birthday using the handle, “Alles Gute A.H. 88,” with one member of the group heard shouting, “Heil Hitler!”
The AfD, now leading opinion polls in Germany, publicly rejects such extremism. The party also states that its use of “remigration” is not to be conflated with a desire to expel citizens of Germany.
On its website, the party says it rejects “arbitrary collective deportation” and opposes the removal of German citizens with a “migrant background.” However, Correctiv also revealed that in 2023 members of the party met at a secret gathering in Potsdam with Austrian “identitarian” activist Martin Sellner to discuss a “master plan” for “remigration,” which Sellner defined as extending to the “reversed settlement” of “non-assimilated” German citizens. Reports of that meeting spurred anti-AfD protests across Germany.
Sellner is another speaker at the 2026 summit. In a video promoting the summit, Sellner says he will talk “about remigration [and] the great replacement,” the conspiracy theory that global elites are plotting to eliminate white Europeans via mass immigration. Attendees, he promises, will meet both influencers and politicians at the summit, where “we’re going to reveal the next big project.”
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the conference — and its mix of extremist and more mainstream speakers — “shows just how far the far right has gotten with its remigration plans.”
Speaking to The Redoubt, Beirich described the presence of an AfD lawmaker, in particular, as “not surprising,” but nonetheless revealing in terms of the party’s agenda and its efforts to promote a more moderate face to the public as it seeks to gain power in the face of dissatisfaction with Germany’s political status quo.
“The party can claim it isn't extremist, but it is belied by its connections,” she said. And “disclaimers” aside, she added: “Make no mistake, remigration is not some supposedly peaceful self-deportation program. It's a racist plan of ethnic cleansing.”
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