Bob Hickok examines how the AfD’s electoral surge is forcing Germany’s political establishment to confront a question it can no longer avoid: what happens when the party behind the firewall starts winning?
Germany’s political order is being tested by a party it was supposed to contain. After the AfD’s landslide victory in Saxony-Anhalt, its commanding national poll numbers, the renewed debate over a party ban, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s attack on “remigration,” and another major state election looming in Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, the firewall is beginning to look less like a solution than a symptom of a system that no longer knows how to stop the AfD’s rise.
