# Martin Sellner **Martin Michael Sellner** (born 8 January 1989) is an Austrian far-right activist and the single most prominent contemporary figure of the European [[Identitarian Movement]]. He is the leader of the Identitarian Movement of Austria, the public face of the 2017 [[Defend Europe]] campaign, and the popularizer of the term [[Remigration]]. His 2023 Potsdam speech and the resulting scandal made him, briefly, one of the most talked-about figures in German-speaking politics. ## From neo-Nazism to Identitarianism Sellner's trajectory illustrates the Identitarian rebrand in a single career. As a teenager he was active in the **neo-Nazi scene** in Austria, reportedly associated with the convicted Holocaust denier Gottfried Küssel. He then made the strategic shift that defines the movement: in 2012, after discovering the French Bloc Identitaire online, he co-founded the **Identitarian Movement of Austria**, importing the lambda branding, the clean youthful aesthetic, and the "defend European identity" framing. The ideology did not soften; the presentation did. This is the same suit-and-tie repackaging traced from [[David Duke]] to [[Richard Spencer]], executed on the European side. ## Defend Europe and the metapolitical model Sellner led the Austrian chapter of [[Génération Identitaire]] and was the frontman of the 2017 [[Defend Europe]] campaign, which chartered a ship to obstruct Mediterranean migrant-rescue NGOs. He built a substantial online presence as a movement "influencer," and when platforms began deplatforming Identitarian accounts in 2018, his individual operation became a model for how the movement decentralized from formal organizations into personality-driven media channels. He drew directly on the [[Great Replacement Theory]] of [[Renaud Camus]] and the [[Ethnopluralism]] and metapolitics of the French [[New Right]]. ## "Remigration" and the Potsdam scandal Sellner is credited with popularizing **[[Remigration]]** — the euphemism for the mass removal of immigrants and their descendants, including citizens, from Europe. In **November 2023** he presented a detailed "remigration" master-plan at a private meeting in **Potsdam** attended by members of the [[AfD]] and some figures from the CDU. The meeting was exposed by the investigative outlet **Correctiv** in January 2024, triggering the largest sustained anti-far-right street protests in modern German history, with hundreds of thousands demonstrating across the country. Germany issued Sellner a **three-year entry ban in March 2024**; a court in Potsdam overturned it weeks later as unlawful, a sequence that became a cause célèbre on the European far right. He has continued to publish and organize, including efforts to build out "remigration"-focused institutions. ## The American breakthrough Sellner's term crossed the Atlantic faster than it had crossed Europe. When [[Donald Trump]] promised "remigration" on [[Truth Social]] in September 2024, Sellner told the *Washington Post*: "I always thought that this would be a meta political victory to make this term known." That November, barred from entering the United States, he addressed [[Jared Taylor]]'s [[American Renaissance]] conference by video link. In May 2025 the State Department created an **[[Office of Remigration]]**, and its creation drew praise from Sellner and other European far-right figures. A year later he co-organized the second **[[Remigration Summit]]** in Portugal (late May 2026), where former Border Patrol commander [[Gregory Bovino]] and Jared Taylor were billed as VIP guests. The arc runs from a teenager in Austria's neo-Nazi scene to the coiner of a word now on a U.S. government organization chart. ## Connections and significance Sellner sits at the center of a transatlantic far-right network. He had documented contact with American alt-right figures, and the [[Identity Evropa]] model in the United States was built on the same Identitarian template he helped propagate. His Austrian organization received a donation from the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch massacre — a link that helped trigger the legal crackdown that dissolved [[Génération Identitaire]] in France in 2021. For the KB, Sellner is the bridge figure: the person who demonstrates how a movement can be banned at the organizational level yet flourish at the level of individual influence and vocabulary, and how a single coined term ("remigration") can travel from a fringe activist's speeches into the platform of a major European party. ## See Also - [[Identitarian Movement]] - [[Génération Identitaire]] - [[Remigration]] - [[Office of Remigration]] - [[Remigration Summit]] - [[Defend Europe]] - [[Great Replacement Theory]]