Germany's political landscape shifted again this autumn as the far-right AfD extended its electoral reach across state contests, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU absorbed losses significant enough that Merz himself called the outcome a disaster. The results are more than a domestic reckoning — they arrive at a moment when Germany's political credibility is load-bearing infrastructure for a €2 trillion EU budget negotiation. When a nation's center struggles to hold, the reverberations travel far beyond its own borders, and the question of who speaks for Germany in Brussels becomes suddenly