In Saxony-Anhalt, a former East German state where economic unease and demographic shifts have long simmered, the far-right Alternative for Germany party has claimed roughly 44 percent of the regional vote — more than doubling its share from five years prior. Yet electoral strength and governing power remain two separate things: every major German party has refused, in advance, to enter coalition with the AfD, erecting a deliberate barrier between popular will and political authority. The result is a tension as old as democracy itself — the question of what a society owes to a movement it fear