Eighty years after designing a republic to resist its own undoing, Germany now faces the test those architects feared most. The Alternative for Germany party's state election victory has transformed postwar constitutional safeguards from theoretical provisions into urgent political instruments. At stake is a paradox as old as liberal democracy itself: whether a free society can defend its freedoms against those who would democratically dismantle them, and whether the act of defense might itself corrode what it seeks to protect.