60 Million – Lena Kotré Explains Who Should Disappear – And One Fears the Answer Because It Is So Quiet

Lena Kotré stood on Thursday next to Martin Sellner and reduced Germany to numbers. Rhetorically more than questionable, unqualifiedly provocative. Eighty-two million people were too many, she said. Sixty million would be enough. This country needs no more than that. It was a right-wing thought experiment, not an inaccuracy. It was a deliberate determination. And she knew exactly what she was doing. Because in the same breath she spoke of around 25 million people with a migration background. The calculation makes itself. Whoever wants to reduce 82 to 60 million and at the same time names a clearly defined group marks a target. What is meant are not only immigrants. What is meant are people with German passports. People who were born here. People who carry this country. Kotré did not speak about migration. She spoke about exclusion. And this exclusion is explicitly directed also against citizens.

That she made these statements at a so-called remigration event, together with Martin Sellner, is no coincidence. Sellner has stood for precisely this ideology for years. Populations are not understood as a society, but as a variable size. Those who do not fit are supposed to leave. That Kotré adopts and publicly represents this logic shows how openly the AfD now orients itself toward far-right concepts. Particularly perfidious is the economic justification Kotré adds afterward. Artificial systems would roll over jobs, she says in essence. From that she derives superfluity. People are reduced to numbers. That technological change has always created new work does not interest her. That care work, construction, transport, health care, education would already collapse today without millions of workers with a migration background is ignored. This calculation is not naive, it is a conscious right-wing line of thought designed to deceive her own voters.

Kotré does not speak about qualifications, not about training, not about social responsibility. She speaks about reduction. About cutting away. About a country thinned out until only those deemed the right ones remain. Anyone who thinks this way has said farewell to the social and democratic reality of this country. And here there is nothing left to relativize. Whoever publicly demands that Germany no longer needs millions of people, whoever links this demand to ethnic categories, whoever stands next to a well-known far-right ideologue while doing so, crosses a line. This is not conservative discourse. This is a political declaration of war on the constitutional state and its citizens.

When Martin Sellner was confronted with the simple question of what the actual share of foreigners in Brandenburg is, he failed to provide an answer. Not out of ignorance. Because it is not about numbers for him, not about reality, not about verifiable facts. It is about mood. About the creation of fear. About the deliberate shifting of perception. Truth only interferes. Hatred works better without it.

In Vetschau they stood next to each other as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Martin Sellner spoke. Lena Kotré sat beside him. Lars Günther was there. Maximilian Merkel used the space to advertise for the Identitarian Movement. Nothing about it was hectic, nothing accidental. It appeared orderly, almost factual. That is precisely what makes it so dangerous. What was visible there was not radicalism in eruption, but radicalism as a condition. People who believe they have understood reality, even though they have long since turned their backs on it. It was not about numbers, not about Brandenburg, not about truth. It was about a feeling that is cultivated because it provides support: the feeling of having been betrayed. Anyone who needs this feeling stops asking questions.

It is particularly hard to grasp that this belief takes hold so strongly precisely where history is not abstract, but experienced. Where people knew what it meant when language was controlled, when belonging was assessed, when deviation was marked. And yet this very experience seems not to warn, but to seduce. As if what was endured was not understood as a warning, but as a template. This is not a political failure, it is a moral one. A quiet one, almost inconspicuous. A failure to take memory seriously. And it is shameful for all those who once took to the streets for freedom. Not with big words, not with staged outrage, but with mere presence. One inevitably asks: if not now, when then? And one fears the answer because it is so quiet.

Lena Kotré knows what she is saying. And whoever speaks like this must live with being called far-right, because it is the only accurate description. What Lena Kotré and Martin Sellner calculated on stage is now taking on concrete political form. The AfD parliamentary group in the Bavarian state parliament wants to turn words into practice. After its retreat in Upper Bavaria, it openly calls for a special deportation police modeled on the American ICE. A separate unit whose sole purpose is the apprehension, detention, and deportation of people, an explicitly stated goal.

This was presented by Katrin Ebner-Steiner, the chair of the AfD parliamentary group. The name of the planned unit sounds technocratic, almost harmless: Asylum, Investigation and Deportation Group. The logic behind it is not. Whoever wants to deport faster needs more coercion, more access, more permanent control. That is exactly what is meant. The point of orientation is the US agency ICE, built up under Republican administrations, brutally expanded under Donald Trump. ICE does not stand for administration. ICE stands for night raids, for arrests in front of schools, for the apprehension of people at court hearings, for deaths, injuries, traumatized families. For fear as a means of politics. That the AfD explicitly wants to import this model says everything about its understanding of the state. Deportation is for them not an administrative act, but a project of demonstrating power.

This is accompanied by a radical restructuring of the state. Three ministries are to be abolished: environment, science, digitalization. Climate protection agencies are to be eliminated without replacement. Thousands of positions gone. Counseling gone. Oversight gone. At the same time, a new police force is to be built, with aircraft, special powers, and curfews for asylum seekers. Bread, bed, soap. Nothing more. Whoever sells this as security means submission. The break with the constitutional state becomes particularly clear in citizenship policy. A German passport, according to the AfD, should only be for those who are economically exploitable. Low-wage work is not enough. Care, cleaning, logistics do not count. Usefulness replaces equality. By AfD calculation, of tens of thousands of naturalizations only a few hundred would remain. Citizenship becomes a privilege, no longer a right under clear rules.

Children also come into focus. Mandatory language tests for all. Those who fail are sorted out. Support classes without a time limit. No religious education anymore. Control from the beginning. Integration is not promoted, but delayed and punished until it fails. This very failure then serves as proof of the ideology.

We know what we are talking about. We have seen ICE. We have documented what happens when deportation of 75 percent innocent people becomes the central task of the state. When authorities no longer weigh, but hunt. When people disappear because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. When even citizens are no longer safe because papers, skin color, or accent are enough. What in Germany is still discussed as theory is long since reality in the United States. And it is brutal.

Germany is not a large country. Germany is small, dense, fully surveillable. A system like ICE would have different, faster, deeper consequences here. More control. More fear. More arbitrariness. Anyone who believes this affects only a few is mistaken. Such systems grow. They need targets. And they find them. What is forming here is not a single proposal, but an overall picture. Reduce the population. Dismantle state apparatuses, except where coercion is exercised. Select citizenship. Militarize deportation. Anyone who puts this together recognizes the direction.

It now requires courage. And it requires support. For journalism that looks closely. For documentation that does not allow itself to be intimidated. For people who understand that this is not a fringe issue. We are not speaking from conjecture. We are speaking from experience. We have already looked this in the eye.