28/08/2026
Written by Prof Alberto Alemanno
This article was originally published on EUobserver
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.
The commission swiftly refused registration.
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.
All were registered. None produced the legislation sought.
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.
Led by far-right activists Eva Vlaardingerbroek and Martin Sellner, the organisers have announced a legal challenge.
The initiative’s language about “ethnic and cultural continuity” and “non-Western” origin gives the commission the stronger case. But the political dilemma is harder.
Registration would not have endorsed the initiative, yet it would have supplied an official EU platform, translations and collection infrastructure.
Refusal instead gave the hard-right ammunition for its well-rehearsed claim that Brussels silences dissent. If rejection proves politically useful, it will be because it confers what no initiative can create for itself: an adversary.
That possibility exposes the ECI’s peculiar record.
Since 2012, 135 initiatives have been registered, but only 14 have reached the million-signature threshold and received a formal reply; even these have generally secured partial, delayed or non-legislative follow-up.
Yet ECI’s formal failures have often achieved more politically than its formal successes.
TTIP, roaming charges, caged animals and a fur-free Europe
“Stop TTIP” – which sought to halt negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – was refused registration, prevailed in court and helped transform Europe’s trade debate.
‘One Single Tariff’ failed to collect the required signatures but nevertheless helped build political pressure for the abolition of roaming charges.
Conversely, “Stop Destroying Videogames” arrived at the commission in January 2026 with nearly 1.3 million verified signatures.
Five months later, the commission declined to legislate, offering talks toward a voluntary industry code instead.
A similar outcome is expected for other ‘successful’ initiatives such as ‘End the Cage Age’, ‘Fur Free Europe’ and ‘Stop Finning’, which remain caught between formal replies and promised action.
Whatever the courts make of it, the dispute points to something larger: three converging developments suggest the ECI may now be entering a phase of sustained political uptake.
The ‘silver lining’ of citizens’ petitions
First, its ideological pluralisation has entered a new phase.
Conservative campaigns used the ECI before; the Save Europe Act is the first to bring that contest into direct collision with the Union’s foundational values.
Second, political movements and parties are beginning to use the instrument pragmatically. The radical right is treating it not merely as a route to legislation but as a means of building a transnational constituency around remigration.
Volt, from the opposite direction, is building a reusable network of potential signatories for successive initiatives.
Both treat the ECI less as a one-off petition and more as infrastructure for European political mobilisation.
Third, the potential constituency is widening.
A record 74 per cent of Europeans now regard EU membership as beneficial, while 73 per cent want the Union to have greater means to confront global challenges.
Registrations are accelerating too: 119 initiatives had been registered by June 2025; just over a year later there were 135, sixteen new registrations, against a long-run average of roughly nine annually.
Together, these developments could break the ECI’s self-reinforcing failure.
Repeated campaigns create visibility, organisational know-how and reusable cross-border networks; ideological competition gives opposing constituencies a reason to enter the same arena.
Each initiative lowers the cost of the next while raising the political cost of Commission indifference.
As I argued over time, once the number of new ECIs reaches a critical mass, institutional behaviour may change even without formal reform.
The commission can disregard an occasional petition, but cannot indefinitely ignore a recurring arena of European political competition.
Here lies the deeper paradox.
In mobilising across borders to contest European integration, the radical right is not endorsing the Union’s values.
But it is conceding that the EU is the arena in which Europe’s political future will be decided.
In trying to shrink the Union, it may be enlarging the tent under which Europeans argue about it.
An incipient polity is revealed not only by what its citizens agree on, but by where they choose to disagree.