By rejecting a racist ‘remigration’ petition, the EU may have finally awakened its sleeping democracy experiment
A remigration campaign has become the first European Citizens' Initiative ever refused for breaching the Union's core values. Yet the fight it has triggered could force Brussels to take its neglected experiment in transnational democracy seriously.
It was bound to happen. Europe’s hard right has embraced the Union’s transnational petition system to advance one of its most radical ideas: remigration.
The European Citizens’ Initiative allows one million citizens across at least seven member states to ask the European Commission to propose legislation.
The “ Save Europe Act ” calls for a moratorium on “non-Western” migration channels, including study and family-reunification visas, and the “remigration” not only of irregular migrants but of wider categories of non-European migrants whose continued presence it says burdens member states.
It found that the initiative’s distinction between “Western” and “non-Western” migrants amounted to racial and ethnic discrimination and was manifestly contrary to EU values.
Citing the Court of Justice’s April 2026 landmark judgment in Commission v Hungary , it added that respect for national identity cannot justify measures incompatible with the Union’s founding values.
This is not the first time the ECI has been used to promote conservative or identity-based causes.
“One of Us”, an anti-abortion campaign, gathered 1.7 million verified signatures; “ Mum, Dad & Kids ” sought to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman; “ Minority SafePack ” and an initiative promoted by the Szekler National Council mobilised around minority and regional identity.
What makes the Save Europe Act unprecedented is therefore not its politics, but the basis of its refusal.
Earlier rejections turned on competence, but here, for the first time, the commission was no longer asking only whether it could act, but whether a demand could enter the Union’s democratic machinery at all.
Alberto Alemanno is an academic, author and one of the leading voices on the democratisation of the EU. He is Democracy Fellow at Harvard University, Jean Monnet Professor at HEC Paris and founder of The Good Lobby.
