In the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, voters delivered the far-right Alternative for Germany party its strongest regional result since the party's founding, a moment that lays bare the deepening estrangement between a significant portion of the German electorate and the political establishment that has long sought to contain it. The AfD's 43.8 percent, won amid record turnout, is not yet power — coalition arithmetic and a longstanding 'political firewall' stand between the result and governance — but it is a reckoning that cannot be dismissed as a regional anomaly. What unfolds in the