In cities across Germany, tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets in September 2026 to resist what they feared was the normalization of far-right politics — a response to the AfD's striking electoral surge in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party claimed nearly forty-four percent of the vote. Under the banner 'Not a Step Back,' the protests carried both a moral urgency and a legal demand: that Germany's Constitutional Court consider banning the AfD outright. The moment echoes older European reckonings with democratic fragility, raising the enduring question of whether civil society's voice