German Far-Right Party Poised for Historic Win, Challenging Postwar Taboo

On a Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany faces a reckoning decades in the making: a far-right party, born of economic grievance and cultural anxiety, stands at the threshold of governing power for the first time since the Nazi era. The Alternative for Germany's potential breakthrough tests whether the postwar democratic consensus — built deliberately on the memory of catastrophe — can hold against the pressures of a changed electorate. What unfolds in this eastern state will not stay there; it will echo across Europe and into every democracy still asking how to live with its own discontents.