Dthe word “remigration” means many things, it is not new. The term chosen by the jury as the worst word of 2023 first appeared in the FAZ archive in February 1956. In the text about the premiere of the composer Friedrich Hollaender, “remigration” is described as “the proportion of those who once emigrated and now return”. Even in later texts, the word is often mentioned in the same breath as return, mostly as a statistical term with no specific political direction: how many people have ever arrived in Germany from a certain country. this country? Or rather: how many Germans emigrated and now return?

Those who have popularized the term in recent days are not interested in either question. Far-right and AfD politicians allegedly met in Potsdam in November and discussed an unconstitutional “remigration master plan,” according to research by the Correctiv network. Martin Sellner, an activist in the Austrian identity movement, is said to have presented what he envisions as “remigration”: the mass deportation of asylum seekers, foreigners with the right of residence and “unassimilated citizens”.

“Euphemistic Cover Vocabulary”

The Unword of the Year jury described the word “remigration” on Monday in Marburg, Hesse, among other things, as a “euphemistic cover word,” a “right-wing combat term” and as “an expression that masks real intentions.” The trick is that the term actually comes from of migration and exile studies,” said Constanze Spieß, linguist and spokesperson for the Unword of the Year jury to FAZ. It covers various, usually voluntary, forms of return. The voluntary return of Jews after World War II is studied by numerous publications. “The term actually means something positive, but it is consciously used ideologically to hide the inhuman intent of deportation and deportation.”

Spieß said the strategy behind this is not new: the right relies on “calculated ambivalence,” deliberately choosing words that can be associated with something else. In the election campaign in the state of Hesse last fall, the right-wing parties deliberately stopped using sensational vocabulary, but rather “softened” harmless terms to make their program more acceptable.

This is how extreme terms came into common use. Spieß says that in Austria, the rights have used the term “foreigners who do not want to integrate”. The term is now used across the political spectrum. Another example is “ethnopluralism”, a term that originally had a positive connotation to refer to the diversity of different lifestyles, but was used by the right to promote their goal of creating ethnically and culturally homogeneous states.

The right-wing ones were taken over for almost ten years

According to Spieß, the term “remigration” has been in use since 1946 and has been used by the right-wing since 2015. When choosing a bad word, the jury always refers only to the previous year, the deadline for entries is December 31. He suspects the word has been used more and more in recent months as it appears on right-wing shows. Björn Höcke, the state chairman of Thuringia's AfD, had already written about a “comprehensive remigration project” in his book in 2018.

According to Spieß, the jury had trouble making a choice. Because this term is chosen as a non-word, it gets a lot of attention. “But we also see it as an opportunity to educate; that people learn to decipher.” This year's guest jury, Ruprecht Polenz, also said that he hopes that by choosing the bad word of the year, it will no longer be so easy to confuse terms.