The European Commission has officially refused to register the pan-European remigration and anti-immigration campaign ‘Save Europe Act’ as a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). On Wednesday, 22 July, organizers announced that Brussels considered the initiative’s aims—to halt open-ended non-Western mass immigration and protect the demographic continuity of Europe’s indigenous population—to constitute ‘racial discrimination’ against third-country nationals and to be ‘contrary to EU values’.
‘Their motivation is vague, weak and telling of their true anti-democratic nature,’ the campaign said in a post on X, accusing the Commission of ‘discarding the voices of nearly 600,000 European patriots’. At the time of writing, the counter on the initiative’s official website stood at more than 580,000 signatures, indicating widespread interest in the campaign launched at the end of May.
In its formal decision, the Commission said the proposed initiative failed one of the legal conditions for registration under the ECI Regulation: citizens’ initiatives may not be ‘manifestly contrary’ to the values enshrined in the EU treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Organizers had already warned weeks earlier that the initiative might be rejected, citing the same legal concern.
Brussels focused particularly on the proposed temporary moratorium on new ‘non-Western’ immigration channels, including study and family-reunification visas. The Commission said the campaign sought to define the moratorium through the ‘ethnic and cultural continuity’ of Europe’s ‘native peoples’ and opposition to what its charter calls ‘demographic replacement’ by non-Western and non-European migrants.
According to the Commission, those criteria would discriminate on the grounds of race and ethnic origin because they classify people according to their ‘ethnic, cultural or civilizational origin’, rather than through the individual, case-by-case assessment required under the applicable legal framework.
The Commission claimed that the decision concerned legal admissibility rather than the political merits of the proposal.
The Save Europe Act was launched on 31 May by Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek and Austrian remigration activist Martin Sellner. Beyond the immigration moratorium, it calls for stronger external-border controls, faster deportations, reform of the asylum system, the removal of welfare incentives described as migration pull factors, and an EU-wide framework for voluntary or financially incentivized remigration.
The campaign passed 100,000 signatures within three days and reached 500,000 in early July, placing it among the fastest-growing campaigns in the ECI’s history. Organizers then announced a new phase centred on volunteer coordination, an expanded activist network, and a demonstration outside the European Parliament.
That rally went ahead in Brussels on 15 July only after Belgium’s Council of State suspended a last-minute ban imposed by Ixelles Mayor Romain De Reusme. Several hundred supporters attended, alongside anti-immigration activists and MEPs. Organizers brought stacks representing more than half a million signatures in a wheelbarrow towards Parliament, where Belgian police blocked Finnish MEP Sebastian Tynkkynen and campaigners from entering for nearly an hour.
Vlaardingerbroek told the crowd that the initiative would continue regardless of Brussels’ response, demanding a halt to legal and illegal non-Western immigration and a Europe-wide remigration system.
After Wednesday’s rejection, the campaign said it would announce its next steps shortly, presenting the decision not as the end of the movement but as further evidence of the political confrontation it was created to provoke. ‘We will not back down,’ Vlaardingerbroek wrote defiantly on X.
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