Marketing Ethnonationalism: The Save Europe Act, by radical dumpling – 28 October 2026

From Czech neo-Nazi organizer Filip Vávra to fragile identitarian activists and elected politicians, Europe’s far right is building a transnational movement around tired white supremacist ideas

On October 10, the Save Europe Act’s European Shield Tour arrived at Prague’s Old Town Square. Its Czech organizer, Martin Kuziel, welcomed supporters beneath a giant banner proclaiming the need for remigration. He was joined by guest speaker Aleksander Mikołaj Szostek, the campaign’s Polish national organizer. The goal was to make mass deportation sound like a normal point of political discussion, one more topic between pensions and infrastructure.

These people warn that European civilization is facing an existential emergency, then spend their days on logos, merchandise and message discipline. Kuziel says he wants Save Europe Act to be as recognizable as Coca-Cola. That means a consistent brand, managed volunteers, promotional material and a tour that can be copied from city to city. They talk like the world is ending and run themselves like a franchise.

The packaging is new but the politics are depressingly familiar. Ethnonationalism gets sold as cultural heritage, public safety and national sovereignty, because “we decide who belongs by ancestry” doesn’t play well at a petition stand visited by normal people. The public pitch is border control and integration. The actual program restricts legal immigration and removes people judged insufficiently assimilated. Anyone repeating the first line without reading the second is part of the problem.

On October 6, the Czech outlet Page Not Found published an investigation that got inside the Czech branch. It documents the internal communications, the volunteer manuals and the organizational structure, and it ties this shiny new campaign to a much older European far-right network.

Antifascists need to pay close attention to the organizing, because the organizing is where this movement actually works. Fascist politics grow through street violence and isolated extremists, but they also grow through recruitment, coalition-building, propaganda and the slow work of making ideas appear “respectable” or harmless that were once radioactive. Each of those feeds the others. Save Europe Act is a clear example of that process running in real time, and the job is to understand it well enough to break it.

Filip Vávra: an old neo-Nazi in a new political landscape

Save Europe Act emerged from the network surrounding Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner and Dutch far-right influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Its May 30 launch at the Remigration Summit in Figueira da Foz, Portugal, brought together European far-right activists and politicians, American white nationalists, and figures associated with the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.

Among those present was Gregory Bovino, the former US Border Patrol commander who became a prominent face of Donald Trump’s mass deportation operations. Czech far-right activist Filip Vávra also attended, as documented in his own social media posts.

Vávra’s presence should attract particular attention in the Czech Republic. He’s not simply another nationalist who has recently become laser-focused on immigration. He emerged from the country’s neo-Nazi scene in the 1990s and became a leading figure associated with National Resistance (Národní odpor), a movement that promoted white nationalism and antisemitism.

His political history includes involvement in demonstrations supporting former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and attempts to organize a torchlit march through Prague’s Jewish Quarter on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. In 2024, the Czech Constitutional Court rejected his complaint in a criminal case concerning the promotion of neo-Nazi propaganda, leaving his nine-month suspended prison sentence in place. Seznam Zprávy reported on the conclusion of the case.

Vávra now presents himself as a defender of Czech patriotism, national sovereignty, and cultural preservation. His current rhetoric targets immigration, the European Union, and the supposed erosion of Czech national identity.

In promoting a nationalist march scheduled for October 28, he held up Poland’s annual Independence March as a model and argued that Czech national belonging requires being born to people who already belong to the nation. He also spends a remarkable amount of time on social media complaining about English words on Prague’s signs and storefronts. Apparently, even the word “pizza” is part of the cultural crisis. It’s a curious obsession for someone who wants to position himself as a serious defender of national identity, but then Vávra’s public life has other sides too. Alongside his efforts to police the Czech language and record himself lurking outside of a local music venue that he refers to as an “ANTIFA den”, he appears to be keeping an eye on the rehabilitation of his musical career. I’ll leave readers to judge that side of his cultural contribution for themselves.

Beneath the cringe, though, the politics are serious. Vávra’s vision of Czech identity rests on a narrow, inherited definition of who can belong, while his complaints about everyday language serve as another way to frame cultural change as a threat to the nation.

This is ethnonationalism in plain language. The nation is treated as an inherited possession, and people who arrive from elsewhere are cast as a threat to its survival. Citizenship and participation in society become secondary to ancestry.

The significance of Vávra’s participation in the remigration movement is therefore more than biographical. His career illustrates how activists from older neo-Nazi milieus can operate within a wider political environment where similar ideas circulate through identitarian organizations, online campaigns, and mainstream political networks. They do not need every participant to share their entire ideological history. They need a common political project through which exclusionary ideas can gain influence.

The violence behind the rhetoric

Vávra’s history is also relevant to the confrontation surrounding the Antifascist Action Festival (AFA Fest), in Prague in May 2026.

On May 1, Vávra organized a counter-event against the festival at Subzero in Prague, presented as a protest “against violence” and what he referred to as “Antifa terrorism.” He had spent months promoting the confrontation before assembling approximately 70 neo-Nazis and toothless hooligans outside the venue. The group attempted to rush the club’s closed entrance before police intervened, and then spent a lot of time congratulating themselves online for being able to run across a street.

This is a familiar tactic of the far-right: portray antifascists as the source of political violence while presenting the mobilization of far-right groups as a legitimate defense of the public. The purpose of antifascism, in this account, is supposedly to intimidate and destabilize society. The purpose of the far right is supposedly to restore order. The political content of the mobilization, and the behavior of its participants, receive considerably less attention.

And despite its short-lived existence and inability to do much of anything, the confrontation had a brutal aftermath. During the early hours of May 2, two members of the German band Abbruch were assaulted by a group of cowards as they returned from the festival. One suffered a broken nose, serious dental injuries, and a loss of consciousness, requiring hospital treatment.

Aktuálně.cz reported on the beating, identifying the attackers as neo-Nazis and describing Vávra as a prominent figure in their milieu. The report also records Vávra’s response distancing himself from the violence. Romea’s reporting, republished by Genocide Watch, documented the victims’ injuries and the subsequent police investigation. Festival organizers identified the attackers as neo-Nazis supportive of Vávra.

Vávra has tried to distance himself from the violence surrounding the counter-mobilization he helped organize, but washing his hands of the consequences is not the same as having clean hands. He helped turn an antifascist festival into a target, drawing a far-right crowd to the venue, where people attempted to force their way inside. Hours later, members of the German band Abbruch were brutally assaulted, with neo-Nazis accused of carrying out the attack. There is no need to pretend Vávra personally ordered that assault to recognize the role this kind of agitation plays. You cannot spend your time whipping up hostility toward antifascists, mobilize a crowd against their event, and then act as though the atmosphere you helped create has nothing to do with you.

For anyone who has spent time in punk venues, squats, underground gigs, or antifascist spaces, none of this is abstract. These are the places far-right groups have tried to intimidate, infiltrate, and drive out of public life for decades. They know that street-level intimidation can make a venue feel unsafe, discourage people from showing up, and force organizers to spend their energy protecting their own communities instead of building them. These groups should not be allowed to turn our spaces into places where people have to look over their shoulders just for attending a gig or standing against fascism.

And antifascism cannot begin and end with spotting a swastika or waiting until somebody gets beaten up. The far right operates through music scenes, social media, street mobilizations, electoral politics, and campaigns deceptively disguised in the language of patriotism and cultural preservation. The packaging changes, but the underlying project can remain familiar. It decides who belongs, marks an enemy, and makes that enemy’s presence increasingly difficult to tolerate. We have to challenge that politics wherever it takes root, document the networks behind it, build solidarity with those being targeted, and refuse to surrender our spaces to intimidation.

Remigration is not simply “immigration control”

In migration studies, remigration is a dull technical term for return migration, people going back to a country they once left. The far right kept the tidy sound of the word and swapped the meaning. It now covers the organized removal of people from the places they live, with the targets picked by origin. The old, “harmless” meaning gives the new one cover. It sounds like a sterile policy tool when it’s really a decision about which people are allowed to be part of Europe.

Save Europe Act’s charter specifically wants a halt to new non-European and non-Western immigration channels, including student visas and family reunification. It wants stronger external borders and faster returns. And it wants a remigration framework for non-European migrants judged “insufficiently integrated”, or a cultural or financial burden. This list reaches people with legal residence, people who came to study, and people who came to join family. The European Commission saw the same thing. In its reasoning, it pointed out that the “non-Western” label can’t be limited to arrivals from abroad, because in practice it also hits European citizens of non-European origin.

Then there’s the integration test. Who writes it? Who sits it? What counts as a pass? What happens to the woman who arrived in 1994, raised three kids, ran a shop, and still gets flagged as a problem because of where she was born? The charter gives no real answer, and that’s actually useful to the people who wrote it. A test with no fixed definition is a lever that can be pulled whenever it suits someone. Anybody can fail it on the day it becomes convenient to fail them.

Martin Sellner, the movement’s co-founder, has spelled out where that lever ends up. In January 2024, the investigative outlet Correctiv reported on a meeting in Potsdam where Sellner laid out his thinking. It included “non-assimilated” German citizens, to be moved out over the long term through laws drafted for the purpose and heavy pressure to adapt. In June 2025, Germany’s Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig went through that concept in detail. The case was about the ban on the far-right magazine Compact, which ran Sellner’s material for years without distancing itself. The court lifted the ban, citing proportionality and freedom of expression. In the same judgment it found that Sellner’s remigration idea violates the equal understanding of citizenship that human dignity protects. It covers people naturalized and people born citizens, and treats citizens with a migrant background as second-class. Under that framework, a passport would not guarantee anyone an unconditional right to stay in their own country. Here’s the judgment. A court that refused to ban the magazine still called the concept exactly what it was, which says something about how clear the finding was.

Pressure is the method because it has to be. Most European states are bound by rules against expelling their own nationals, so a plan that includes citizens can’t be run through the front door. It runs through hostile laws, hostile paperwork and a daily message that you’re lucky to be a guest in the country you were born in.

The conspiracy theory running the movement

Under all of this sits the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, popularized by the French writer Renaud Camus. The claim is that immigration is a deliberate scheme to displace native Europeans (understood to be white) with elites helping it along. It takes housing shortages, precarious jobs, gutted public services and a general sense that things are coming apart, and gives people a villain with a face. Migrants get blamed for conditions they didn’t create while the people who did create those conditions never get asked a question.

Within weeks of the Portugal launch, the campaign was staging publicity. In July its backers delivered signatures to the European Parliament for the media’s cameras, and by the time the Commission ruled, close to 600,000 online signatures had piled up. On July 22, 2026, the Commission refused to register the initiative, finding it manifestly contrary to EU values and fundamental rights. It pointed in particular to the broad restrictions on immigration channels based on non-European and non-Western origin. Legal commentators note this was the first time the Commission refused an initiative on the values ground (the decision is on EUR-Lex). Organizers announced a legal challenge, which is now before the EU’s General Court as Case T-621/26.

Don’t expect them to fold. A rejection fits nicely into the story they already tell about elites silencing ordinary people, and registration was never the whole point anyway. They want remigration to become a familiar word, backed by an international network, until people stop flinching at it. A proposal that sounds vile in full can sound reasonable when it arrives through border management, security and “cultural continuity.”

David Bučko and the math that doesn’t math

David Bučko, spokesperson for the Czech chapter of the Save Europe Act, is open about the premise.

He calls the Great Replacement a reality backed by demographic data and says the initiative exists to stop it and protect Europe’s “ethno-cultural heritage.” The Czech outlet Page Not Found went through his numbers in an investigation published October 6, and they fall apart pretty quickly. Bučko was talking about Spain and mixed up two different groups: people born abroad and people who hold foreign citizenship. In 2025 Spain had roughly 9.46 million residents born outside the country and 6.91 million foreign citizens. Those groups overlap, but they aren’t the same. Someone born abroad can become a Spanish citizen, and someone born in Spain can still hold a foreign passport.

Bučko then stretched the 2021 to 2025 trend forward and concluded that people born abroad would outnumber people born in Spain around 2057. Spain’s own official projections say that in 2074, people born in Spain will still make up 61% of the population.

Even if the foreign-born share did grow quickly, that would not show that anyone is coordinating a “replacement.” The theory supplies that conclusion before looking at a single number. Population change gets read as proof of a plot, and the reading then gets cited as evidence for the plot.

Jan Charvát, a political scientist who studies extremism and spoke to Page Not Found, points out that identitarian movements rarely argue for racial hierarchy out loud. The idea, known as ethnopluralism, redefines diversity as a world of separate peoples, each in its own territory. That lets keeping people apart be sold as the protection of cultural diversity, even though it requires ending diversity inside the countries where people already live.

The charter itself draws a line between European or Western migration and everyone else. When Page Not Found asked Bučko which countries count as non-Western, he talked about people who don’t come from Western culture and never gave a specific list, though he added that non-Western migrants who don’t “respect Western culture” should be excluded. The charter’s restrictions on legal immigration, though, are set by origin, and nobody gets assessed on how they actually behave.

Martin Kuziel wants to be Coca-Cola

Martin Kuziel is the national coordinator in Czechia and a member of Mladí Svobodní, the youth wing of Svobodní. He told Konzervativní noviny that he didn’t start the Czech branch on his own, but that Sellner approached him directly and asked him to launch it. Kuziel obviously said yes, and the branch got going soon after.

In public, Kuziel talks about remigration as the fast, systematic return of people living in the country illegally, people whose asylum claims were rejected, and people who committed crimes. Those categories show up in mainstream immigration debates all the time. They don’t cover what’s in the charter, which also targets legal migration and proposes remigration measures for non-European migrants deemed insufficiently integrated or a serious burden. Page Not Found asked him about the broader demands and his relationship with Sellner. He didn’t answer.

His ambitions are easier to read. He wants a big organization that can influence politics, and the leaflets, petition stands and posters are just a starting point. He has said he wants Save Europe Act to “be as recognizable as Coca-Cola”, which is a funny thing to say about an allegedly grassroots and spontaneous defense of Europe’s “cultural inheritance.” A brand that can be copied from country to country, with the same messaging, materials and identity, was planned. Nobody stumbles into that by chance.

Kuziel also says remigration used to be considered radical and is now creeping into normal political conversation. That shift is a goal in itself. Charvát told Page Not Found that an identitarian movement doesn’t need the public to swallow the whole program. If it keeps putting remigration on the table, it moves the edge of what counts as acceptable. Once removing legally resident migrants is something people discuss over dinner, other harsh proposals start to look like the moderate option.

Sellner’s history should also be clarified here. He was active in Austria’s neo-Nazi scene before becoming one of the leading faces of the identitarian movement, which holds that Europe must preserve its ethnic and cultural makeup, and he also took part in Defend Europe, a campaign to obstruct humanitarian groups rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. Save Europe Act happily inherits people, ideas and organizing methods from that intrinsically fascist world.

Inside EuroCom: the script and the people running it

The strongest part of the Page Not Found investigation is the exposure of the material from inside the movement. The reporters got into EuroCom, the movement’s Europe-wide volunteer network, along with internal discussions, organizing instructions and campaign manuals. EuroCom is essentially how Save Europe Act turns online sympathy into actual activity. According to the investigation, it has tiers of membership based on trust, activity and responsibility. New users start at the bottom while regional leadership takes sustained involvement and sign-off from the national organizer. Regional leaders run volunteers and local campaigns, and national organizers oversee each country.

Inside that structure, the Czech branch coaches supporters on how to bring up the movement’s demands and how to answer critics. The manual tells volunteers to open with themes of public safety, cultural heritage and helping people in real need. Controlled, legal, organized migration is to be described as acceptable. Arguments about cultural compatibility and where migrants come from get introduced later, as the conversation develops. There are canned replies for the words racist, extremist and Nazi. If someone says the movement sounds like the Nazis, the suggested answer is “We don’t want to kill anyone, just to send them home.” If someone says racist, volunteers are advised to say the issue is cultural compatibility and that race doesn’t come into it. The manual also tells people to leave memes out of it, because memes make the organization look less credible.

The internal chatter is where it gets interesting. One volunteer asked whether calling controlled migration acceptable was too broad a concession. A member of the national leadership reportedly said the manual wasn’t meant to contain everything the organization actually wants. Its job was to give an answer to “what do you want?” that sounded “at least somewhat reasonable.”

Put that next to the charter, with its moratorium on non-European and non-Western immigration channels and its remigration framework for migrants considered insufficiently integrated or a burden, and the gap is obvious. The volunteers carry the “friendly” version and the program is the other document. You start with concerns that people with no far-right background already have, then slowly introduce a society where belonging depends on origin and cultural fit. The demands stay exactly where they were while the actual approach gets softer.

The people carrying that script include some with real positions. The investigation names František Kubásek, who runs the website Incorrect.cz and works at the Czech Ministry of the Environment, as an active regional leader and moderator. He posted updates from leaflet drives, coordinated social media pushes and helped organize the Prague event on October 10. He also promoted Save Europe Act on his site and urged readers to sign up as supporters and volunteers.

Libor Vondráček, leader of Svobodní and a member of parliament, is another supporter. He has appeared at public events next to activists collecting signatures and called Save Europe Act a commendable and reasonable initiative. When Page Not Found asked about Sellner’s background, Vondráček said he didn’t know why those labels were applied to him. He later dismissed the link between Nazism and the far right as a leftover of Soviet propaganda. Not every supporter shares the same motives, but the campaign builds local structures, coordinates events across borders and cultivates people who already have platforms, giving the project real and dangerous routes into mainstream politics and society.

In August 2026 the initiative announced more than 700,000 online supporters. However, as Page Not Found noted, people without EU citizenship can register support on the website, so that figure doesn’t necessarily equal valid signatures. The internal discussions the reporters saw mention about 180 Czech volunteers, and that count could include inactive accounts and lurkers.

The links to the wider identitarian scene show up in the international training materials and the business ties. The materials describe a strategy called “Reconquista,” borrowing the name of the medieval Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula as a metaphor for taking back European institutions and public space. The history behind the label makes it a strange choice for volunteers who insist they only want people to go home peacefully. The Reconquista as a single story of Christian reclamation is largely a later construct, one that many historians have picked apart, and its traditional endpoint is 1492. That year Granada fell and the Crown ordered Jews expelled. Muslims who stayed were pushed into conversion, and in the early 17th century the converted Moriscos were expelled as well.

The tactics come from the same school of thought. The materials draw on earlier identitarian campaigns built to grab attention, rattle opponents and cast immigration as a threat to European identity. The template is the French Génération Identitaire, whose activists occupied the roof of a mosque under construction in Poitiers in 2012, and whose milieu produced Defend Europe, the Mediterranean ship campaign Sellner took part in. The French government dissolved Génération Identitaire in 2021. The method relies on a small group staging a striking image, and a well-cut video making a few dozen people look like a movement. Save Europe Act’s wheelbarrow stunt in Brussels followed the same playbook.

The business ties show who’s behind the volunteers. Save Europe Act’s website says it works with IB-Shop, a store run by Kohorte UG, formerly Identitäre Bewegung BY UG, a company that still identifies with the identitarian milieu. That company shares a Chemnitz address with Sellner’s Institut für Remigration, so the campaign’s merchandise partner and its policy shop operate from the same place.

The institute is relevant because it shows where the leaflets are meant to lead. Ahead of September’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt, it published a 49-page plan for the first 100 days of an AfD-led government, including a dedicated state office for remigration. It pitches the state as a showcase for the rest of Germany, and it targets people without secure legal status as well as legally resident foreigners seen as insufficiently assimilated. According to Correctiv, it also reuses language from Sellner’s 2023 Potsdam meeting about pressuring “non-assimilated citizens” with tailored laws. The AfD officially keeps Sellner at a distance, yet AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund attended the Potsdam meeting.

So what do we do with this?

Take away the logo, the leaflets, the well-dressed Charlie Kirk fan-boys, and the friendly opening line, and what’s left is a campaign to sort Europeans by perceived ancestry and push out everyone on the wrong side of the sort. It’s state-sanctioned white supremacy with a shiny press kit. The people running it sat down and wrote a manual on how to say “we want to send people away” without making a stranger at a petition stand recoil or raise an eyebrow.

Look at who’s running it. Sellner came out of Austria’s neo-Nazi scene and rebranded the same ideas with a business license. Kuziel wants his outfit to be as recognizable as Coca-Cola, which tells you how seriously he takes the people he plans to deport. Vondráček, a sitting member of parliament, inexplicably thinks the link between Nazism and the far right is a leftover of Soviet propaganda. A Ministry of the Environment employee runs regional operations on the side. These people lost twice in a month and responded by suing and opening an institute. They are persistent, and they are very sure that polite packaging will carry them the rest of the way.

So don’t hand it to them. When a volunteer says they only want controlled migration, ask about the moratorium on student visas and family reunification. Make them say the rest out loud. Put the charter next to the manual and give people both to examine clearly. Map who’s involved, where they work, who funds them and who shows up at their events. All of it’s public, and there’s a lot of it. Turn up at their stands and leaflet drives and make their mainstream look as small as it is. Back the migrant organizations and local groups who would be first on their list, because those people are already doing the work and they’re tired of doing it alone.

Don’t wait for a court or a state-sanctioned commission to finish this. The rejection in July bought some time, and they’ve spent it building. They have a brand and an institute with a draft plan for a state government. We have the facts, each other and a lot of ground to cover.

radical dumpling: screaming into the void about anti-fascism and anti-imperial consistency, from somewhere between east and west.

This article first appeared on the author’s Substack and is republished here with permission.

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