The Great Replacement
The Great
Replacement (French: grand remplacement), also known as replacement theory or
great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory espoused by French author Renaud
Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of
"replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations
at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white
peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration,
demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then,
similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the
United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy
of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic
statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopædia
Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its
blatant absurdity."
While
similar themes have characterized various far-right theories since the late
19th century, the particular term was popularized by Camus in his 2011 book Le
Grand Remplacement. The book associates the presence of Muslims in France with
danger and destruction of French culture and civilization. Camus and other
conspiracy theorists attribute recent demographic changes in Europe to
intentional policies advanced by global and liberal elites (the
"replacists") from within the Government of France, the European
Union, or the United Nations; they describe it as a "genocide by
substitution".
The
conspiracy theory found support in Europe, and has also grown popular among
anti-migrant and white nationalist movements from other parts of the West; many
of their adherents maintain that "immigrants [are] flocking to
predominantly white countries for the precise purpose of rendering the white
population a minority within their own land or even causing the extinction of
the native population". It aligns with (and is a part of) the larger white
genocide conspiracy theory[b] except in the substitution of antisemitic canards
with Islamophobia.This substitution, along with a use of simple catch-all
slogans, has been cited as one of the reasons for its broader appeal in a
pan-European context, although the concept remains rooted in antisemitism in
many white nationalist movements, especially (but not exclusively) in the
United States.
Although
Camus has publicly condemned white nationalist violence, scholars have argued
that calls to violence are implicit in his depiction of non-white migrants as
an existential threat to white populations. Several far-right terrorists,
including the perpetrators of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, the 2019
El Paso shooting, the 2022 Buffalo shooting and the 2023 Jacksonville shooting,
have made reference to the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory.
American conservative media personalities, including Tucker Carlson and Laura
Ingraham, have espoused ideas of a replacement. Some Republican politicians
have endorsed the theory in order to appeal to far-right members of the
Republican Party and as a way of signalling their loyalty to Donald Trump.
Background
Renaud Camus
developed his conspiracy theory in two books published in 2010 and 2011, in the
context of an increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric in public discourse during
the previous decade. Europe also experienced an escalation in Islamic terrorist
attacks during the 2000s–2010s, and a migrant crisis in the years
2015–2016, which
exacerbated tensions and prepared public opinion for the reception of Camus's
conspiracy theory. As the latter depicts a population replacement said to occur
in a short time lapse of one or two generations, the migrant crisis was
particularly conducive to the spread of Camus's ideas while the terrorist
attacks accelerated the construction of immigrants as an existential threat
among those who shared such a worldview.
Camus's
theme of a future demise of European culture and civilization also parallels a
"cultural pessimistic" and anti-Islam trend among European
intellectuals of the period, illustrated in several best-selling and
straightforwardly titled books released during the 2010s: Thilo Sarrazin's
Germany Abolishes Itself (2010), Éric Zemmour's The French Suicide (2014) or
Michel Houellebecq's Submission (2015).
Concept of
Renaud Camus
The
"Great Replacement" conspiracy theory was developed by French author
Renaud Camus, initially in a 2010 book titled L'Abécédaire de l'in-nocence
("Abecedarium of no-harm"),[c] and the following year in an eponymous
book, Le Grand Remplacement (introduction au remplacisme global).[d] Camus has
claimed that the name Grand Remplacement "came to [him], almost by chance,
perhaps in a more or less unconscious reference to the Grand Dérangement of the
Acadians in the 18th century. As an epigraph to the later book, Camus chose
Bertolt Brecht's quip from the satirical poem Die Lösung that the easiest thing
to do for a government which had lost the confidence of its people would be to
choose new people.
According to
Camus, the "Great Replacement" has been nourished by
"industrialisation", "despiritualisation" and
"deculturation"; the materialistic society and globalism
having created a "replaceable human, without any national, ethnic, or
cultural specificity", what he labels "global
replacism". Camus claims that "the great replacement does not
need a definition," as the term is not, in his views, a "concept"
but rather a "phenomenon".
In Camus's
theory, the indigenous French people ("the replaced") is described
as being demographically replaced by non-white populations ("the replacing
[peoples]"—mainly coming from Africa or the Middle East—in a process
of "peopling immigration" encouraged by a "replacist
power".
Camus
frequently uses terms and concepts related to the period of Nazi-occupied
France (1940–1945). He for instance labels "colonizers" or
"Occupiers"[h] people of non-European descent who reside in Europe,
and dismisses what he calls the "replacist elites" as
"collaborationist". In 2017 Camus founded an organization named the
National Council of European Resistance, in a self-evident reference to the
World War II National Council of the Resistance (1943–1945). This analogy to
the French Resistance against Nazism has been described as an implicit call to
hatred, direct action or even violence against what Camus labels the
"Occupiers; i.e. the immigrants". Camus has also compared the
Great Replacement and the so-called "genocide by substitution" of the
European peoples to the Holocaust.
Claimed
influences
Camus cites
two influential figures in the epilogue of his 2011 book The Great Replacement:
British politician Enoch Powell's apocalyptic vision of future race
relations—expressed in his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech—and French
author Jean Raspail's depiction of the collapse of the West from an
overwhelming "tidal wave" of Third World immigration, featured in his
1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.
Camus also
declared to The Spectator magazine in 2016 that a key to understanding the
"Great Replacement" can be found in his 2002 book Du Sens. In the
latter he wrote that the words "France" and "French" equal
a natural and physical reality rather than a legal one, in a cratylism similar
to Charles Maurras's distinction between the "legal" and the
"real country".[i]During the same interview, Camus mentioned that he
began to imagine his conspiracy theory back in 1996, during the redaction of a
guidebook on the department of Hérault, in the South of France: "I
suddenly realized that in very old villages [...] the population had totally
changed too [...] this is when I began to write like that."
Similar
themes
Despite its
own singularities and concepts, the "Great Replacement" is
encompassed in a larger and older "white genocide" conspiracy theory,
popularized in the US by neo-Nazi David Lane in his 1995 White Genocide
Manifesto, where he asserted that governments in Western countries were
intending to turn white people into "extinct species". Scholars
generally agree that, although he did not father the theme, Camus indeed coined
the term "Great Replacement" as a slogan and concept, and eventually
led it to its fame in the 2010s.
The idea of
"replacement" under the guidance of a hostile elite can be further
traced back to pre-WWII antisemitic conspiracy theories which posited the
existence of a Jewish plot to destroy Europe through miscegenation, especially
in Édouard Drumont's antisemitic bestseller La France juive (1886). Commenting
on this resemblance, historian Nicolas Lebourg and political scientist
Jean-Yves Camus suggest that Renaud Camus's contribution was to replace the
antisemitic elements with a clash of civilizations between Muslims and
Europeans. Also in the late 19th century, imperialist politicians invoked
the Péril jaune (Yellow Peril) in their negative comparisons of France's low
birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries. From that claim arose
an artificial, cultural fear that immigrant-worker Asians soon would
"flood" France. This danger supposedly could be successfully
countered only by increased fecundity of French women. Then, France would
possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual flood of immigrants from Asia. Maurice Barrès's nationalist
writings of that period have also been noted in the ideological genealogy of
the "Great Replacement", Barrès contending both in 1889 and in 1900
that a replacement of the native population under the combined effect of
immigration and a decline in the birth rate was happening in France.
Scholars
also highlight a modern similarity to European neo-fascist and neo-Nazi
thinkers from the immediate post-war, especially Maurice Bardèche, René Binet
and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, and to concepts advanced from the 1960s onward by
the French Nouvelle Droite.The associated and more recent conspiracy theory of
"Eurabia", published by British author Bat Ye'or in her 2005
eponymous book, is often cited as a probable inspiration for Camus's
"Great Replacement". Eurabia theory likewise involves globalist
entities, that are led by both French and Arab powers, conspiring to Islamize
Europe, with Muslims submerging the continent through immigration and higher
birth rates. The conspiracy theory also depicts immigrants as invaders or as a
fifth column, invited to the continent by a corrupt political elite.
Analysis
Demographic
statistics
While the
ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration,
scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement"
as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific,
racially prejudiced views. Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's
thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are
somehow not French."Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim
population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in
2001,making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.
Racial
connotations
In the words
of scholar Andrew Fergus Wilson, whereas the islamophobic Great Replacement
theory can be distinguished from the parallel antisemitic white genocide
conspiracy theory, "they share the same terms of reference and both are
ideologically aligned with the so-called '14 words' of David Lane ["We
must secure the existence of our people and a future for white
children"]." In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League wrote that
"since many white supremacists, particularly those in the United States,
blame Jews for non-white immigration to the U.S.", the Great Replacement
theory has been increasingly associated with antisemitism and conflated with
the white genocide conspiracy theory. Scholar Kathleen Belew has argued that
the Great Replacement theory "allows an opportunism in selecting
enemies", but "also follows the central motivating logic, which is to
protect the thing on the inside [i.e. the preservation and birth rate of the
white race], regardless of the enemy on the outside."
According to
Australian historian A. Dirk Moses, the great replacement theory is a form of
psychological projection in which Europeans—who enacted settler-colonial
projects entailing the elimination and replacement of native populations by
settler societies—fear the reverse may happen to them.
In German
discourse, Austrian political scientist Rainer Bauböck questioned the
conspiracy theorists' use of the terms "population replacement" or
"exchange" (Bevölkerungsaustausch). Using Ruth Wodak's analysis that
the slogan needs to be viewed in its historical context, Bauböck has concluded
that the conspiracy theory is a reemergence of the Nazi ideology of Umvolkung
("ethnicity inversion").
Popularity
Camus's
tract for his 2014 "day of anger" demonstration against the
"great replacement": "No to the change of people and of
civilization, no to antisemitism"
The
simplicity and use of catch-all slogans in Camus's formulations—"you have
one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people"—as
well as his removal of antisemitism from the original neo-Nazi "white
genocide" conspiracy theory, have been cited as conducive to the
popularity of the "Great Replacement" in Europe.
In a survey
led by Ifop in December 2018, 25% of the French subscribed to the conspiracy
theory; as well as 46% of the responders who defined themselves as "Gilets
Jaunes" (Yellow Vest protesters).In another survey led by Harris
Interactive in October 2021, 61% of the French believed that the "Great
Replacement" will happen in France; 67% of the respondents were worried
about it.
The theory
has also become influential in far-right and white nationalist circles outside
of France. The conspiracy theory has been cited by Canadian far-right political
activist Lauren Southern in a YouTube video of the same name released in July
2017.Southern's video had attracted in 2020 more than 686,000 views and is credited with helping to
popularize the conspiracy theory. Counter-jihad Norwegian blogger Fjordman has
also participated in spreading the theory. It has also been promoted by the
German edition of The Epoch Times, a far-right Falun Gong-associated newspaper.
Prominent
right-wing extremist websites such as Gates of Vienna, Politically Incorrect,
and Fdesouche [fr] have provided a platform for bloggers to diffuse and
popularize the theory of the "Great Replacement". Among its main promoters are also a
wide-ranging network of loosely connected white nationalist movements,
especially the Identitarian movement in Europe, and other groups like PEGIDA in
Germany.
Political
influence
Europe
France
Much of the
European spread of the Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement)
conspiracy theory rhetoric is due to its prevalence in French national
discourse and media. Nationalist right-wing groups in France have asserted that
there is an ongoing "Islamo-substitution" of the indigenous French
population, associating the presence of Muslims in France with potential danger
and destruction of French culture and civilization.
In 2011,
Marine Le Pen evoked the theory, claiming that France's "adversaries"
were waging a moral and economic war on the country, apparently "to
deliver it to submersion by an organized replacement of our population".
In 2013, historian Dominique Venner's suicide in Notre-Dame de Paris, in which
he left a note outlining the "crime of the replacement of our people"
is reported to have inspired the far-right Iliade Institute's main ideological
tenet of the Great Replacement.[85] Referring to the conspiracy theory, Marine
Le Pen publicly praised Venner, claiming that his "last gesture, eminently
political, was to try to awaken the French people".
In 2015,
Guillaume Faye gave a speech at the Swedish Army Museum in Stockholm, in which
he claimed there were three societal things being used against Europeans to
carry out a supposed Great Replacement: abortion, homosexuality and
immigration. He asserted that Muslims were replacing white people by using
birthrates as a demographic weapon.
In June
2017, a BuzzFeed News investigation revealed three National Front candidates
subscribing to the conspiracy theory ahead of the legislative elections. These included Senator Stéphane Ravier's personal assistant, who claimed the
Great Replacement had already started in France. Publishing an image of
blonde girl next to the caption "Say no to white genocide", Ravier's
aide politically charged the concept further, writing "the National Front
or the invasion".
By September
2018, in a meeting at Fréjus, Marine Le Pen closely echoed Great Replacement
rhetoric. Speaking of France, she declared that "never in the history of
mankind, have we seen a society that organizes an irreversible submersion"
that would eventually cause French society to "disappear by dilution or
substitution, its culture and way of life". Following the Christchurch
mosque shootings, Le Pen falsely denied knowledge of the theory.
Former
National Assembly delegate Marion Maréchal, who is a junior member of the
political Le Pen family, is also a proponent of the theory. In March 2019, in a
trip to the U.S., Maréchal evoked the theory, stating "I don't want France
to become a land of Islam". Insisting that the Great Replacement was
"not absurd", she declared the "indigenous French" people,
apparently in danger of being a minority by 2040, now wanted their
"country back".
National
Rally's serving president Marine Le Pen, who is the aunt of Maréchal, has been
heavily influenced by the Great Replacement. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
has described the conspiracy theory creator Renaud Camus as Le Pen's
"whisperer". In May 2019, National Rally spokesman Jordan
Bardella was reported to use the conspiracy theory during a televised debate
with Nathalie Loiseau, after he argued that France must "turn off the
tap" from the demographic bomb of African immigration into the country.
In June
2019, journalist and author Éric Zemmour pushed the concept in comparison to
the Kosovo War, claiming "In 1900, there were 90% Serbs and 10% Muslims in
Kosovo, in 1990 there were 90% Muslims and 10% Serbs, then there was war and
the independence of Kosovo". Zemmour, author of The French Suicide, has
repeatedly described "the progressive replacement, over a few decades, of
the historic population of our country by immigrants, the vast majority of them
non-European".[97] Later that month, Marion Maréchal joined Zemmour in
invoking the Great Replacement in relation to the Balkan region, stating
"I do not want my France to become Kosovo" and declared that the
changing demographics of France "threatens us" ("nous
menace") and that this was increasingly clear.[96] Zemmour ran for
president in 2022 and continued to extensively promote the theory during his
campaign.[98] He finished in fourth place in the first round of the election,
taking 7,07% of the vote.
Austria
Identitäre
Bewegung Österreich (IBÖ), the Austrian branch of the Identitarian movement,
promotes this theory, citing a "great exchange"[j] or replacement of
the population that supposedly needs to be reversed. In April 2019,
Heinz-Christian Strache campaigning for his FPÖ party ahead of the 2019
European Parliament election endorsed the conspiracy theory. Claiming that
"population replacement" in Austria was a real threat, he stated that
"We don't want to become a minority in our own country". Compatriot
Martin Sellner, who also supports the theory, celebrated Strache's political
use of the Great Replacement.
Belgium
In September
2018, Schild & Vrienden [nl], an extremist Flemish youth organization, were
reported to be endorsing the conspiracy theory. The group, claiming that native
populations of Europe were being replaced by migrants; they proposed an end to
all immigration, forced deportation of non-whites, and the founding of
ethnostates.The following month, VRT detailed how the organization was
discussing the Great Replacement on secretive chat channels, and using the
conspiracy theory to promote Flemish ethnic identity.
In March
2019, Flemish nationalist Dries Van Langenhove of the Vlaams Belang party
repeatedly stated that the Flemish people were "being replaced" in
Belgium, posting claims on social media which endorsed the Great Replacement
theory.
Denmark
Use of the
Great Replacement (Danish: Store Udskiftning) conspiracy theory has become
common in right-wing Danish political rhetoric. In April 2019, Rasmus Paludan,
leader of the Hard Line party, which is widely associated with the Great
Replacement,[109] claimed that by the year 2040 ethnic Danish people would be
approaching to be a minority in Denmark, having been outnumbered by Muslims and
their descendants. During a debate for the 2019 European Parliament elections,
Paludan used the concept to justify a proposal to ban Muslim immigration and
deport all Islamic residents from the country, in what Le Monde described as
Paludan "preaching the 'great replacement theory'".
In June
2019, Pia Kjærsgaard (Danish People's Party) invoked the conspiracy theory
while serving as Speaker of the Danish Parliament. After the alleged
encouragement of Muslim communities to "vote red", for the Social
Democrats; Kjærsgaard asked "What will happen? A replacement of the Danish
people?".
Finland
Far-right
Finns Party representatives and ministers have used the word "great
replacement" (Finnish: Väestönvaihto) in their writings.Finns Party
Speaker of the Parliament Jussi Halla-Aho and the party leader Riikka Purra
have also promoted the theory. Halla-aho stated that it is ”dishonest to say
that the great replacement is not going on, that it would not be rapid, and
that it would not continue just as long as it is allowed to continue.” Riikka
Purra wrote ”In any case, I use the term great replacement myself, because that
is what this is, as long as this is being actively perpetrated”, Purra wrote.
"As long as immigration policy is active and promotes immigration, the
Finnish population will be exchanged for another".In October 2023 four men
were convicted of offences committed with terrorist intent. According to the
prosecutor, the defendants were motivated by the idea of a conspiracy of the
government and Jewish people to replace the native population. Police said the
potential targets of the attack were political decision-makers.
Germany
Ex-SPD
politician Thilo Sarrazin is reported to be one of the most influential
promoters of the Great Replacement, having published several books on the
subject, some of which, such as Germany Abolishes Itself, are in high
circulation. Sarrazin has proposed that there are too many immigrants in
Germany, and that they supposedly have lower IQs than Germans. Regarding the
demographics of Germany, he has claimed that in a century ethnic Germans will
drop in number to 25 million, in 200 years to eight million and in 300 years:
three million.
In May 2016,
Alternative for Germany (German: Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) deputy
leader Beatrix von Storch used a language reminiscent of the theory when she
claimed that plans for a mass exchange of populations ("Massenaustausch
der Bevölkerung") had long been made.
In April
2017, a few months before he assumed the leadership of the AfD, Alexander
Gauland released a press statement regarding the issue of family reunification
for refugees, in which he claimed that "Population exchange in Germany is
running at full speed". In October 2018, following Beatrix von
Storch's lead, Bundestag member Petr Bystron said the Global Compact for
Migration was part of the conspiracy to bring about systemic population change
in Germany.
In March
2019, Vice Germany reported how AfD MP Harald Laatsch [de] attempted to justify
and assign blame for the Christchurch mosque shootings, in relation to his
"The Great Exchange"[j] theory, by asserting that the shooter's
actions were driven by "overpopulation" from immigrants and
"climate protection" against them. Laatsch also claimed that the
climate movement, who he labelled "climate panic propagators", had a
"shared responsibility" for the massacre, and singled out child
activist Greta Thunberg.
Similarly,
right-wing publicist Martin Lichtmesz [de] denied that either Anders Behring
Breivik's 2011 manifesto, which referred to the Eurabia variant of the
"white genocide" narrative, or Brenton Tarrant's 2019 The Great
Replacement manifesto, had any connection to the theory. Claiming that it was,
in fact, not a conspiracy theory at all, Lichtmesz said both Breivik and
Tarrant were reacting to a real phenomenon; a "historically unique
experiment" of a "Great Exchange"[j] of people.
Hungary
Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán and his political party Fidesz in Hungary have been
associated with the conspiracy theory over the course of several years. The
Sydney Morning Herald detailed Orbán's belief in and promotion of the Great
Replacement as being central to the modern right-wing politics of Europe. In
December 2018, he claimed the "Christian identity of Europe" needed
saving, and labelled refugees traveling to Europe as "Muslim
invaders". In a speech, Orbán asserted: "If in the future Europe is
to be populated by people other than Europeans, and we accept this as a fact
and see it as natural, then we will effectively be consenting to population
replacement: to a process in which the European population is replaced".
He has also
stated: "In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the
answer of the West is migration," concluding that "We Hungarians have
a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian
children." ThinkProgress described the comments as pushing a version of
the theory. In April 2019, Radio New Zealand published insight that Orban's
plans to cut taxes for large Hungarian families could be linked with fears of
the Great Replacement.
Ireland
A 2019 Lidl
advertisement that featured a white Irish woman, her Afro-Brazilian partner and
their mixed race son was targeted by former journalist Gemma O'Doherty as part
of an attempt at a "Great Replacement". After facing online
harassment the family decided to leave Ireland.[123][124][125] The "Great
Replacement" has also been used in Ireland in opposition to direct
provision centres, used to house asylum seekers.
Writing in
2020, Richard Downes said that "Rather than seeing the increase in
non-Irish people living and making their lives here as being a normal part of a
modern European country, some of the new nationalists see it as a conspiracy to
overwhelm Ireland with foreigners. For many of them the conspirators include
the Irish government, NGOs, the EU and the UN. They believe that these
organisations want to replace Irish people with brown and black people from
abroad."
The term
"great replacement" was also used when the RTÉ News featured the
three first babies born in 2020, born to Polish, Black and Indian mothers;
journalist Fergus Finlay saying "I don't care about the vulgar abuse, but
I really do believe that these hatemongers should be prosecuted when they
incite others to hatred and violence against people whose only crime is their
skin colour or religion. I find it hard to understand why the State hasn't
acted already against these cruel ideologues who think they can say whatever
they like under the banner of free speech. They may be small in number now, and
on the surface they may just seem bonkers, but we've been here before.
Political movements have been built on hatred of the other, and we know the
damage they have caused."
Garda
Commissioner (national chief of police) Drew Harris spoke about far right
groups in 2020, saying that "Irish groups [believing] in the great
replacement theory" had plans "to disrupt key State institutions and
infrastructure. This included Dublin Port, high profile shopping areas such as
Grafton Street in Dublin, Dáil Éireann and Government departments."
Some
participants in the 2022–2023 Irish anti-immigration protests such as Hermann
Kelly and Derek Blighe support a Great Replacement theory, as well as referring
to the influx of immigrants as an "invasion" and a
"plantation".
The current
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has endorsed the Great Replacement
ideology. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of Italy (2018–2019) has
repeatedly adopted the theme of the Great Replacement. In May 2016, two years
before his election to office, he claimed "ethnic replacement is
underway" in Italy in an interview with Sky TG24. Accusing nameless,
well-funded organizations for importing workers that he named "farm
slaves", he stated that there was a "lucrative attempt at
genocide" of Italians.
In April
2023, the Minister of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forests Francesco
Lollobrigida remarked to a trade union conference that "Italians are
having fewer children, so we're replacing them with someone else. [We say] yes
to helping births, no to ethnic replacement. That's not the way forward".
Netherlands
In April
2015, writing on the publishing website GeenStijl, scholar of Islam Hans Jansen
used Great Replacement rhetoric, suggesting that it was an
"undisputed" fact that among the European Union's governing elite
there was a common consensus that Europeans were "no good and can be
better replaced". In May 2015, Martin Bosma, a Dutch parliament
Representative for the Party for Freedom (PVV), released his book Minority in
their own land [nl]. Invoking the conspiracy theory, Bosma wrote about a
growing 'a new population' of immigrants which lent itself to an apparently
'post-racial Multicultural State of Salvation'.
In March
2017, Thierry Baudet, leader of the right wing Forum for Democracy (FvD) party,
promoted the theory after he claimed that the country's so-called elite were
deliberately "homeopathically diluting" the Dutch population, in a
speech about "national self-hatred". He said there was a plot to
racially mix the ethnic Dutch with "all the people of the world", so
that there would "never be a Dutchman again".
In January
2018, PVV Representative Martin Bosma endorsed the Great Replacement theory,
and one of its key propagators, after meeting with Renaud Camus at a PVV
demonstration in Rotterdam and tweeting his support. Filip Dewinter, a leading
member of the Flemish secessionist Vlaams Belang party, who had traveled to the
Netherlands on the day of the protest to meet with Camus, named him as a
"visionary man" to the media.
Party for
Freedom politician Geert Wilders of the Netherlands supports the notion of a
Great Replacement occurring in Europe.In October 2018, Wilders invoked the
conspiracy theory, claiming the Netherlands was "being replaced with mass
immigration from non-western Islamic countries" and Rotterdam being
"the port of Eurabia". He claimed 77 million, mainly Islamic
immigrants would attempt to enter Europe over the course of half a century, and
that white Europeans would cease to exist unless they were stopped. In
2019, The New York Times reported how Camus's demographic-based alarmist
theories help fuel Wilders and his Party for Freedom's nativist campaigning.
In September
2018, Dutch author Paul Scheffer analyzed the Great Replacement and its
political developments, suggesting that Forum for Democracy and Party for
Freedom were forming policy regarding the demography of the Netherlands through
the lens of the conspiracy theory.
Spain
The
far-right party Vox has been described as circulating the theory for its
discourse about low natality rates in Spaniards compared to migrants. According
to journalist Antonio Maestre of El Diario, such an ideology is shared between
Vox and some extreme strains of Catalan nationalism who fear replacement by
Spanish-speakers.
United
Kingdom
According to
November 2018 research from the University of Cambridge, 31% of Brexit voters
believe in the conspiracy theory compared to 6% of British people who oppose
Brexit.[
In July
2019, left-wing English musician and activist Billy Bragg released a public
statement which accused fellow singer-songwriter Morrissey of endorsing the
theory. Bragg suggested "that Morrissey is helping to spread this
idea—which inspired the Christchurch mosque murderer—is beyond doubt".
Prior to the
2024 United Kingdom general election, videos of non-white people in London with
captions such as "This is not Iran" spread on social media. Hope not
Hate researcher Patrik Hermansson described the videos as prime examples of dog
whistles due to using language and imagery that direct viewers to the
conspiracy theory without explicitly referencing it. He said, "[The
videos] are dangerous because they often avoid moderation and appear acceptable
by seeming neutral in how they present reality".
Turkey
Leader of
the Victory Party Ümit Özdağ uses a Turkish version of the theory. He
previously argued that Turkey will be a "Migrantland" (Göçmenistan)
unless Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu wins the 2023 Turkish presidential election.
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