In a small German state with an outsized symbolic weight, voters handed the far-right Alternative for Germany party its most consequential electoral victory since the Second World War — not because extremism has taken root, but because trust in the center has quietly withered. The result in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany's poorest region, speaks to a broader European exhaustion: with economic insecurity, with immigration anxieties, with institutions that feel distant and unresponsive. What happens in Germany rarely stays in Germany, and a continent already strained by war, trade pressure, and democrat