In Saxony-Anhalt, a historically burdened corner of eastern Germany, voters cast ballots in an election that carries the weight of postwar democratic norms. The far-right AfD, polling near 40 percent, stands poised to become the largest party in any German state since the Second World War — a threshold that, if crossed, would test whether the political firewalls built to contain extremism can still hold. The outcome speaks not only to the anxieties of a sparsely populated, economically strained region, but to the broader question of whether liberal democratic consensus in Europe's largest nati