Less than a year into his chancellorship, Friedrich Merz faces a defining electoral test as voters in Brandenburg and Saxony cast ballots that will be read as a verdict on his coalition's viability and his capacity to govern in an era of far-right ascendancy. These eastern German states, long fertile ground for the Alternative for Germany party, have become the terrain on which the broader question of German democratic stability is being contested. What unfolds there will not stay there — it will travel to Berlin, and into the longer story of how liberal democracies reckon with the forces they