If, on the morning of Friday, 30 January 2026, you had entered the press room of the Italian Parliament’s lower house (Camera dei Deputati), you would have been struck by a level of confusion remarkable even by the typically chaotic standards of Italian politics. A handful of left-wing MPs from the Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement, and the green-socialist AVS had occupied the room, where they were now singing.
They were trying to prevent a press release organised by then-Lega MP Domenico Furgiuele, and authorised, albeit with open reluctance, by the House Speaker and prominent Lega member Lorenzo Fontana. The press release was meant to launch a popular law proposal on remigration and natality. It had been drafted over the previous weeks by the Committee for Remigration and Reconquest (Comitato Remigrazione e Riconquista), an alliance of hard-right forces such as avowed fascist Luca Marsella’s Casa Pound, the Veneto Skinhead Front, and the Web of Patriots.
The Left, rallying at the idea of ‘keeping nazi-fascists outside of Parliament,’ succeeded in preventing the event. It also drew significant public attention to the law proposal itself, which, in the next twenty-four hours, gathered the 100,000 signatures needed for it to be put to Parliament.
Not that, in the previous months, attention to the topic of remigration hadn’t been simmering more or less quietly in Italian society. The bill’s authors had, in fact, closely followed the textbook rules of Italian grassroot politics on escalation and public agenda-setting—once the exclusive domain of liberal radicals such as Marco Pannella and autonomists like Umberto Bossi.
On 17 May 2025, an international ‘Remigration Summit’ held in Milan, and featuring activists from across Europe, had sparked intense outrage in what has long been the capital city of Italian secularism—the birthplace of both Italian socialism and fascism. Major clashes between the Italian police and Antifa protesters ensued. More recently, on 30 November 2025, the Committee’s formal launch in an industrial (and certainly not right-wing) city like Brescia attracted ample coverage in the national media.
It is hard to establish whether the 100,000 signatures gathered so quickly in late January expressed conscious, in-depth appreciation of the bill’s dictum or, more probably, an exasperated plea for swift policy action that might tackle acute migration-related pressures. In this sense, the draft bill itself struck an interesting balance between legal precision and appealing language.
The core articles (10 and 11) propose allocating 1 billion euros to establish a National Remigration Programme and to support the voluntary, assisted return of legally residing foreigners to their countries of origin. This would include financial incentives (paid in instalments and monitored depending on ‘performance’), pre-departure professional training, reintegration support (including logistical, legal, health, and microcredit assistance), organised travel, and post-return monitoring. Participation would require signing a Voluntary Remigration Pact, committing beneficiaries to proper use of funds and generally prohibiting re-entry to Italy, with penalties for violations. Eligible applicants would include certain legal residents and asylum seekers who withdraw their claims. Irregular migrants and those convicted of serious crimes would be excluded. Other articles complement this aspect of the bill with tough provisions on migrant crime and loss of citizenship, as well as financial stimulation for native natality. Curiously, Article 16 brings back ius sanguinis, fully restoring the citizenship rights of Italian migrants and their descendants which the current government had curtailed in 2025.
The broad—one might even say generic—provisions outlined in the draft might be excused as suitable for a popular law proposal at such an early stage of advancement. Others, however, argue that the whole debate on remigration betrays a linguistic (and, therefore, conceptual) cunning with high political stakes.
Commenting on the use of remigrazione on the website of Accademia della Crusca—Italy’s most authoritative institution on the history and evolution of the Italian language—Florence-based linguist and academic Raffaella Setti has raised the question of what remigration even means. In her contribution, she implicitly evoked the Hegelian distinction between bekannt (“familiar”) and erkannt (“known”) to observe that, like nationhood and unlike citizenship, the notion of remigration might well be a “false clear idea.” Referencing earlier scholarship, she also noted that the first historical employment of ‘re-immigration’ in Italian was rather sinister: it described the possibility, granted to German-speaking Italian citizens after the 1939 Pact of Steel, to transition “freely” into the German Reich’s territories. Most poignantly, and not just from a linguist’s perspective, Setti highlights that the current use of the word (and the agenda it stands for) doesn’t seem to indicate any final direction. The prefix /re-/ might indeed suggest a repetition of the original action (i.e., migration) in the opposite sense; however, it is rather unclear what destination that process should have. In plain words, remigration might be fine to its proponents so long as the aliens go somewhere else.
These remarks are very much true of the Italian remigration debate—on the conceptual as well as on the political level. A few days after the popular law proposal on remigration was launched, former General and media sensation Roberto Vannacci MEP left the League—which had granted him a platform for political resonance and election since the first half of 2024—to start a party of his own. His newly founded “National Future” (Futuro Nazionale) attracted two defecting League MPs, Rossano Sasso and Domenico Furgiuele, who had granted the League a monopoly on the issue of remigration within the Italian constitutional arch—though the competition wasn’t particularly intense.
With Vannacci splintering, the grassroot movements advocating remigration have a new, rhetorically capable interlocutor who is steeped in a tradition of military and nationalistic pride, rather than defence of local communities and cultural integrity (as the League still is). As a general election approaches, that raises an immediate concern about the role of remigration policies within the Italian right-wing discourse. Will Giorgia Meloni, for the sake of electoral prudence, potentially nudge towards the Remigration and Conquest Committee by allowing Vannacci to remain within the perimeter of her coalition, despite centrist reservations, and even after he broke with one of her major allies? Or will she risk leaving remigration-centred concerns to her right, at a time when, despite her record, victory at the next general election doesn’t seem certain?
These tactical questions, in turn, will make it even more urgent to establish what the debate on remigration is actually about, and what purpose it tries to serve. The secular outlook and poorly disguised fascism of the bill’s authors is already telling, in this sense. The bill’s text only reinforces the impression that remigration, in its current Italian declination, fundamentally means strengthening State authority and pursuing mass deportations on yet unspecified ethnic grounds. And there is also a question of whether it can mean a concern for the spiritual and cultural identity of Italians and its homogeneity, which are hardly ever mentioned in the law’s draft. The focus, instead, is on questioning freedom of movement as a notion, rather than simply limiting it—with Article 2.2 stipulating “as a binding principle, that there is no intrinsic right to migrate”—and on preserving “the State’s legal personality” from alien aggression before anything else (Article 7).
While coming from and, to a good extent, embodying a state-heavy political tradition, I doubt that this is the direction in which Giorgia Meloni wants to steer her political project. Unless she wishes to get stuck between unsolved, rampant issues of mass migration and reduced natality, on the one hand, and the risks of indulging crypto-ethnonationalist speech, Meloni will once again have to devise or, at least, encourage a solution that is both bold and intelligent—one that assuages the EU establishment without excessively giving into it.
The initiative of Lega MEPs Susanna Ceccardi, Anna Maria Cisint, and Silvia Sardone, who are launching a pan-European observatory on radical Islam, might well provide her with a more appealing and just path: advocating to remigrate any active, avowed enemies of Christian civilisation, rather than just about everyone who isn’t a white Italian.
This essay appears in the Spring 2026 issue of The European Conservative, Number 38:52-53.
Remigration: Aimless or Soulless? The Italian Debate
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If, on the morning of Friday, 30 January 2026, you had entered the press room of the Italian Parliament’s lower house (Camera dei Deputati), you would have been struck by a level of confusion remarkable even by the typically chaotic standards of Italian politics. A handful of left-wing MPs from the Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement, and the green-socialist AVS had occupied the room, where they were now singing.
They were trying to prevent a press release organised by then-Lega MP Domenico Furgiuele, and authorised, albeit with open reluctance, by the House Speaker and prominent Lega member Lorenzo Fontana. The press release was meant to launch a popular law proposal on remigration and natality. It had been drafted over the previous weeks by the Committee for Remigration and Reconquest (Comitato Remigrazione e Riconquista), an alliance of hard-right forces such as avowed fascist Luca Marsella’s Casa Pound, the Veneto Skinhead Front, and the Web of Patriots.
The Left, rallying at the idea of ‘keeping nazi-fascists outside of Parliament,’ succeeded in preventing the event. It also drew significant public attention to the law proposal itself, which, in the next twenty-four hours, gathered the 100,000 signatures needed for it to be put to Parliament.
Not that, in the previous months, attention to the topic of remigration hadn’t been simmering more or less quietly in Italian society. The bill’s authors had, in fact, closely followed the textbook rules of Italian grassroot politics on escalation and public agenda-setting—once the exclusive domain of liberal radicals such as Marco Pannella and autonomists like Umberto Bossi.
On 17 May 2025, an international ‘Remigration Summit’ held in Milan, and featuring activists from across Europe, had sparked intense outrage in what has long been the capital city of Italian secularism—the birthplace of both Italian socialism and fascism. Major clashes between the Italian police and Antifa protesters ensued. More recently, on 30 November 2025, the Committee’s formal launch in an industrial (and certainly not right-wing) city like Brescia attracted ample coverage in the national media.
It is hard to establish whether the 100,000 signatures gathered so quickly in late January expressed conscious, in-depth appreciation of the bill’s dictum or, more probably, an exasperated plea for swift policy action that might tackle acute migration-related pressures. In this sense, the draft bill itself struck an interesting balance between legal precision and appealing language.
The core articles (10 and 11) propose allocating 1 billion euros to establish a National Remigration Programme and to support the voluntary, assisted return of legally residing foreigners to their countries of origin. This would include financial incentives (paid in instalments and monitored depending on ‘performance’), pre-departure professional training, reintegration support (including logistical, legal, health, and microcredit assistance), organised travel, and post-return monitoring. Participation would require signing a Voluntary Remigration Pact, committing beneficiaries to proper use of funds and generally prohibiting re-entry to Italy, with penalties for violations. Eligible applicants would include certain legal residents and asylum seekers who withdraw their claims. Irregular migrants and those convicted of serious crimes would be excluded. Other articles complement this aspect of the bill with tough provisions on migrant crime and loss of citizenship, as well as financial stimulation for native natality. Curiously, Article 16 brings back ius sanguinis, fully restoring the citizenship rights of Italian migrants and their descendants which the current government had curtailed in 2025.
The broad—one might even say generic—provisions outlined in the draft might be excused as suitable for a popular law proposal at such an early stage of advancement. Others, however, argue that the whole debate on remigration betrays a linguistic (and, therefore, conceptual) cunning with high political stakes.
Commenting on the use of remigrazione on the website of Accademia della Crusca—Italy’s most authoritative institution on the history and evolution of the Italian language—Florence-based linguist and academic Raffaella Setti has raised the question of what remigration even means. In her contribution, she implicitly evoked the Hegelian distinction between bekannt (“familiar”) and erkannt (“known”) to observe that, like nationhood and unlike citizenship, the notion of remigration might well be a “false clear idea.” Referencing earlier scholarship, she also noted that the first historical employment of ‘re-immigration’ in Italian was rather sinister: it described the possibility, granted to German-speaking Italian citizens after the 1939 Pact of Steel, to transition “freely” into the German Reich’s territories. Most poignantly, and not just from a linguist’s perspective, Setti highlights that the current use of the word (and the agenda it stands for) doesn’t seem to indicate any final direction. The prefix /re-/ might indeed suggest a repetition of the original action (i.e., migration) in the opposite sense; however, it is rather unclear what destination that process should have. In plain words, remigration might be fine to its proponents so long as the aliens go somewhere else.
These remarks are very much true of the Italian remigration debate—on the conceptual as well as on the political level. A few days after the popular law proposal on remigration was launched, former General and media sensation Roberto Vannacci MEP left the League—which had granted him a platform for political resonance and election since the first half of 2024—to start a party of his own. His newly founded “National Future” (Futuro Nazionale) attracted two defecting League MPs, Rossano Sasso and Domenico Furgiuele, who had granted the League a monopoly on the issue of remigration within the Italian constitutional arch—though the competition wasn’t particularly intense.
With Vannacci splintering, the grassroot movements advocating remigration have a new, rhetorically capable interlocutor who is steeped in a tradition of military and nationalistic pride, rather than defence of local communities and cultural integrity (as the League still is). As a general election approaches, that raises an immediate concern about the role of remigration policies within the Italian right-wing discourse. Will Giorgia Meloni, for the sake of electoral prudence, potentially nudge towards the Remigration and Conquest Committee by allowing Vannacci to remain within the perimeter of her coalition, despite centrist reservations, and even after he broke with one of her major allies? Or will she risk leaving remigration-centred concerns to her right, at a time when, despite her record, victory at the next general election doesn’t seem certain?
These tactical questions, in turn, will make it even more urgent to establish what the debate on remigration is actually about, and what purpose it tries to serve. The secular outlook and poorly disguised fascism of the bill’s authors is already telling, in this sense. The bill’s text only reinforces the impression that remigration, in its current Italian declination, fundamentally means strengthening State authority and pursuing mass deportations on yet unspecified ethnic grounds. And there is also a question of whether it can mean a concern for the spiritual and cultural identity of Italians and its homogeneity, which are hardly ever mentioned in the law’s draft. The focus, instead, is on questioning freedom of movement as a notion, rather than simply limiting it—with Article 2.2 stipulating “as a binding principle, that there is no intrinsic right to migrate”—and on preserving “the State’s legal personality” from alien aggression before anything else (Article 7).
While coming from and, to a good extent, embodying a state-heavy political tradition, I doubt that this is the direction in which Giorgia Meloni wants to steer her political project. Unless she wishes to get stuck between unsolved, rampant issues of mass migration and reduced natality, on the one hand, and the risks of indulging crypto-ethnonationalist speech, Meloni will once again have to devise or, at least, encourage a solution that is both bold and intelligent—one that assuages the EU establishment without excessively giving into it.
The initiative of Lega MEPs Susanna Ceccardi, Anna Maria Cisint, and Silvia Sardone, who are launching a pan-European observatory on radical Islam, might well provide her with a more appealing and just path: advocating to remigrate any active, avowed enemies of Christian civilisation, rather than just about everyone who isn’t a white Italian.
This essay appears in the Spring 2026 issue of The European Conservative, Number 38:52-53.
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