German federal police have stopped Maximilian Märkl, a remigration activist, at Munich Airport as he attempted to board a flight to the Remigration Summit 2026 in Porto, Portugal.
The activist was issued a temporary exit ban on May 28, running until midnight on May 30, explicitly justified on the grounds that his participation would “tarnish the reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany”.
The measure was taken by the Federal Police Inspectorate (Bundespolizei), not by a court.
According to the German police, spreading the concept of remigration is “problematic”.
In their justification of the ban, officials wrote: “With this, you demonstrably participate actively in the above-mentioned event, thereby strengthening the transnational networking of the Identitarian Movement in Europe and the dissemination of the identitarian interpretation of the term remigration.”
According to the German police, this is connected to “the conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’, which is used to spread the view that political elites are deliberately promoting mass immigration in order to replace the native peoples and cultures of Europe.”
The term was popularised by the French writer Renaud Camus and is described by most researchers and European governments as a conspiracy theory.
Märkl, spokesperson of the Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland (IBD), documented the incident with photos of the official stamp in his passport.
In a widely shared post, he wrote: “The EU no longer holds back. I was just arrested at Munich Airport and prevented from leaving the country. My fundamental right to freedom of movement has been violated because I allegedly threaten the reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany.
“Right before the Remigration Summit, they’re panicking. They’ve already lost every single debate and the culture war.
“Every European can see the devastating consequences of the population replacement with his own eyes. So they’re playing their final card: raw repression.
“They’re trying to jail Dries Van Langenhove, and now they’ve stopped me from leaving my own country. They want to scare millions of patriots into submission before they vote for change. But there’s one thing they forgot in their desperation: repression backfires.”
The EU No Longer Holds Back 🇪🇺🚨
I was just arrested at Munich Airport and prevented from leaving the country.
My fundamental right to freedom of movement has been violated because I allegedly threaten the reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany.Right before the… pic.twitter.com/YZAGORsYHC
— Maximilian Märkl (@max_maerkl) May 28, 2026
The move drew immediate political pushback. Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician Franz Schmid quoted Märkl’s post and announced he had submitted a formal parliamentary question to the German government, demanding to know the legal basis for the ban and how authorities reconcile it with constitutional guarantees of freedom of movement and EU free-movement rules.
The Remigration Summit 2026 is due to take place on May 30 (10.30am to 8pm local time) in Porto.
It is the second edition of the event, following the 2025 gathering in Milan, Italy, and brings together European nationalist and remigration-focused activists, politicians and intellectuals.
Organisers describe it as a platform to discuss “sovereignty, identity, and demographic renewal” through concrete remigration policies aimed at reversing mass migration and restoring ethnocultural cohesion across Europe.
The summit has drawn attention and opposition from mainstream media and left-wing groups across the continent.
This is not an isolated case. Eight remigration activists were similarly blocked from flying out of Munich to the 2025 summit in Milan; some travelled by road and later faced prosecution for breaching their exit bans.
Van Langenhove continues to battle a series of politically charged legal cases, including a second “hate speech” conviction handed down by a court in Leuven, Belgium, on May 25. He was fined €4,000 over a February 2024 university lecture in which he linked mass migration to crime and falling living standards. The judge wrote that even where his statements drew on evidence and statistics, this did not change the criminal intent. He had earlier been sentenced to a year in prison and fined €24,000 in a separate 2024 case in Ghent.
German authorities have increasingly used administrative tools, from financial investigations to movement restrictions, against figures associated with the broader “remigration” debate.
A man in Bavaria had his house raided by police after retweeting a meme mocking German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens party. https://t.co/pRdkEZl45k
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) November 14, 2024
