Congratulations To Germany.
43.8 percent to the AfD in the state election in Saxony-Anhalt.
For anyone outside Germany: the AfD is the national opposition, the party the entire political establishment has spent a decade declaring unacceptable, unclean and beyond the pale.
It just became the largest party in the state with more than double the vote of anyone else.
The governing conservatives, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, lost more than half of their voters in a state they had held since 2002. Their liberal coalition partner was thrown out of the state parliament altogether. And turnout hit 77.8 percent, a record, up more than seventeen points from the last election.
That last number is the one that matters. People stayed home for years because they had given up. Now they get up and go and vote. That only happens when people believe again that there is something to vote about.
For ten years the answer to this has been name-calling. Extremists. Backward. Dangerous. The whole establishment machine ran at full power, and the result is that nearly one in two voters went there anyway.
The demonization has lost its grip. It only works as long as people are afraid to stand alone with what they think. The moment the neighbor says it out loud, the game is over.
This is how it starts. Someone has to go first, and it is always the ones who go first who take the most beating. But once the first door is kicked in, the rest goes faster. Europe moves slowly, slowly, and then all at once. Wait and see.
Across Europe the socialists and the left can look forward to their days being numbered. They spent thirty years telling people their country was not their own, that their history was something to be ashamed of, and that their children should be raised to apologize for existing.
The bill for that is arriving now, and it gets paid at the ballot box, one country at a time.
The people have had enough.
We are not going forward. We are going home!🪽✝️❤️🔥