Martin Sellner: Austrian extremist stirs up political storm in Germany

For decades the political consensus in Germany, where the horrors of the Nazi past still weigh heavily, has held that extremist rightwing ideologies would never again become popular enough to succeed at the ballot box. 

Events over the past week, however, have thrown that into question. 

A meeting between senior figures in the far-right Alternative for Germany party — which has won the support of nearly one in four Germans, according to polls — and Martin Sellner, an Austrian extremist ideologue barred from the UK and the US on public safety grounds, has scandalised Germany’s political class and sent the country’s media into a tailspin. 

At the meeting first reported by the investigative news outlet Correctiv, AfD politicians and wealthy benefactors discussed mass deportations and other incendiary ideas with Sellner at an elegant lakeside villa, the Landhaus Adlon, in Berlin in November. Many see the meeting as a Rubicon: the AfD, they say, is radicalising, even as political support for it grows.

Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader, has fired her closest adviser, who was in attendance. But that has not stopped the backlash. Rallies have been held all over Germany, with tens of thousands of people turning out in cities across the country to “march against fascism, old and new”. Calls to ban the AfD outright are now being made at the highest levels. 

Sellner is an unlikely threat to the German republic: a modish 35-year-old with a modest but ardent social media following, an enthusiasm for rap, a neo-Nazi past, and no actual political party, let alone jackbooted heavies, behind him.

He believes that societies are degraded by too much cultural mixing, and that unchecked multiculturalism is behind many of modern Europe’s problems.

Sellner’s signature proposal is “remigration”, which he says stands for forcibly removing immigrants who break the law or “refuse to integrate”, regardless of their citizenship status. Critics say it amounts to ethnic cleansing.

His oeuvre comprises niche political books, heavy with references to philosopher Martin Heidegger and lesser, more controversial idols of proto-fascist thought, such as Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt.

For those paying close attention, the young Austrian has for years been an unavoidable figure on the far-right activist scene in German-speaking Europe. And despite condemnation in the media, court-cases and government bans — he was barred from the UK in 2018 and the US in 2019 — his reach has only seemed to grow.

Natascha Strobl, a political scientist and longtime follower of the Austrian and the Identitarian activist movement for which he was once the spokesperson, said: “In one sense, Sellner and the Identitarians are an extreme fringe.”

But, she added, “Sellner has also been very successful. He understands well how to drive a media frenzy and how to get his ideas noticed.”

“The meeting [at Landhaus Adlon] was certainly not harmless,” Strobl said. “When you have someone like Sellner, openly networking with senior AfD politicians and managers and business people . . . that signifies something has changed.”

Sellner, who grew up in a comfortably middle-class household, fell into neo-Nazism as a teenager in the quiet town of Baden bei Wien, just outside the Austrian capital. His early beliefs were coloured significantly by Holocaust deniers in Austria and abroad.

At 17, Sellner was caught with a friend sticking a swastika on the local synagogue, along with the phrase “legalise it”. The two teens had been angered by the conviction of British historian David Irving for denying the existence of the Holocaust that year, according to a police record of their arrest.

At university, he studied philosophy and joined an extremist fraternity, Burschenschaft Olympia, which espoused more nuanced views and led him to distance himself from what he called the “youthful sin” of his crude Nazi sympathies.

Sellner and “new right” groups such as the Identitarians draw a distinction between their beliefs and neo-Nazism in claiming they make no judgments about the superiority of any race over another, though critics question their sincerity.

Sellner abandoned a law degree for what he considered his calling: politics. 

In 2012, he became a founding member of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, a new far-right nationalist group heavily influenced by France’s “Bloc Identitaire” and Italy’s neo-fascist movement “CasaPound”.

Like them, it sought to borrow from the techniques and actions of left-wing movements such as Greenpeace. Sellner continues to cite Gene Sharp, the American political scientist whose theory of non-violent resistance underpins most modern liberal and leftwing protest groups, as one of his biggest political influences.

The Identitarians, under Sellner’s careful choreography, gained media time with stunts such as scaling the Brandenburg gate in Berlin in 2016 to unfurl a huge banner calling for “secure borders”, capitalising on growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

In 2019, he married Brittany Pettibone, a Californian alt-right YouTube influencer.

Sellner was revealed to have been the recipient of a €1,500 donation from the Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who went on a rampage in March of 2019, killing 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Austria’s government initiated court proceedings against the Identitarians, accelerating the dissipation of the movement. Even the country’s hard-right Freedom party (FPÖ) turned against him.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Sellner branched out into anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine messaging that fed the FPÖ and AfD discourse.

As the two populist parties have themselves grown more radical amid a cost of living crisis and the lingering social effects of the pandemic, Sellner’s cachet has risen. At the Landhaus Adlon, he was the star turn — and so was his “remigration” concept.

He argues this idea is backed privately by many Austrians and Germans who cannot voice public support for it, given their countries’ history.

The AfD itself champions aggressive measures to reduce immigration and supports the expulsion of convicted criminals and people with no legal right to stay, but has sought to distance itself from Sellner’s position. Weidel claimed the meeting at the Landhaus Adlon had nothing to do with her.

But many already detect the growing influence of new right ideas on the party — and note how much of Sellner’s language and concepts seem to be seeping into the party’s programme.

For now, the German furore appears to have served him well.

Hours after Correctiv published its story, Sellner mocked the media for sensationalising a meeting that according to him was not secret at all. He has also used the buzz generated around his name to promote his works, including his book Remigration — a proposal. A jury of German linguists said remigration was the “non-word” of the year 2023, saying it was used as a euphemism by right-wing parties.

“One of Sellner’s main ideas is that in order to be able to do something, you have to make it sayable,” said Bernhard Weidinger, a senior researcher of rightwing movements at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, a historical research institute in Vienna.

“‘Remigration’ is an example of how Sellner has played an important role in modernising far-right discourse. It’s about getting these terms, these narratives, these framings across to a broader audience. Or getting them into the public consciousness.”

This article has been corrected since publication to reflect that Brenton Tarrant is Australian, not from New Zealand.