AfD's Saxony-Anhalt Victory Signals Shift in German Politics

In the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the far-right Alternative for Germany party has achieved an electoral result that can no longer be explained away as protest or anomaly. What began as a movement on the margins of German democracy has arrived, statewide, as a force demanding reckoning — not merely from Chancellor Merz and the political establishment, but from the broader European project that postwar Germany helped to build. The question history is now asking is not whether the AfD is real, but whether the institutions around it are prepared to answer.