Which brings us back to contemporary German politics. Saxony-Anhalt votes on 6 September 2026. The latest public polls put the AfD around 42 percent, the CDU around 22, everyone else fighting over the last chairs: an outright majority of seats is no certainty, a political earthquake already is. Nationwide the AfD sits near 28 percent, the “Christian Democratic Union” around 21. In certain group chats the champagne is already rehearsing its cork-pop, which is, in truth, a Germanic naïve reading. Because in Germany a majority of votes is often only the opening scene: the second is written by those who still control the building, the budget lines, and the deeply unchristian evening news.

A lead in the polls of various German state elections is not a true take-off, which is why the early champagne is so obviously the wrong instrument. The first job is not to deliver a toast: it is to dismantle the vicious German echo chamber, the wretched mainstream press, the Atlantic circles, the NATO sub-organizations, the EU machinery in Brussels, and then back again through the same microphones. Until that circuit is broken, a majority in Magdeburg is only a louder noise in the same room. Kind of like the final desert hollow in The English Patient: a spectacular last scene, a body in the sand, and no one arriving in time to heal the English patient.

The coalition of the already-aligned

CDU, SPD, Greens and the Left have not discovered a sudden romance: they have discovered a shared allergy. The “firewall” against the AfD is no longer a slogan, it is a calendar. Committee seats, civil-service careers, “democratic standards” and emergency federalism will all be used to make an AfD-led state government look like a temporary blackout disaster. Starting at the latest a day after the election and at the earliest about a few weeks ago.

NATO, of course, will send no bouquet, despite the AfD not slapping on a clean sticker reading “out of NATO tomorrow.” The official line is colder and more German: the alliance is fine if  it remains a purely defensive club. American troops and nuclear weapons on German soil should go home, Europe should carry more of its own weight, and Russia’s security interests keep wandering into the sentences. Party leader Tino Chrupalla has already asked what the pact is still worth if it does not respect Moscow. For an alliance that uses Germany as a logistics warehouse, that is plenty; for an ever farther push toward and around Russia, it is not.

Brussels is even less sentimental. The AfD’s Europe policy is the classic last resort: prune the EU back to a market with flags. And if that fails, a German exit or a “democratic dissolution,” followed by a looser European economic club. The draft programmes did put a German EU exit quite plainly on the table. AfD leader Alice Weidel has lately sent the euro and open Schengen to the departure lounge: the EU-Commission, the EU-Parliament and the many EU-subcommittees that mainly hold hearings about hearings will treat a German AfD state government the way a hotel treats a guest who has mentioned he might leave with the minibar. None of this is a plot in the underground garage: institutions defend their operating system, that is already in the job description.

The second act is already on the desk

Baden-Württemberg’s Green finance minister, Danyal Bayaz, has already hinted that a state which “questions rule-of-law principles” might feel pain in the Länderfinanzausgleich, the transfer system that ships money from rich southwestern states to poorer northern and eastern ones. Saxony-Anhalt lives on that pipeline. The legal details are messy; the political message is not: solidarity may suddenly grow terms and conditions.

And the whispering is already darker than the black in the German flag. Once a state is framed as a democratic delinquent, the federal toolbox comes up from the cellar: Bundeszwang, the constitutional crowbar with which Berlin can force a Land into “fulfilling its duties.” After that the salon radicals will talk as if the federation were a tennis club and Saxony-Anhalt a member who forgot the dress code.

Here, of course, comes the German religion as well: a startling number of citizens treat paragraphs as if Moses had carried them down from the Brocken. In this national theology, laws are not tools, they are holy furniture - very old and very entangled furniture, that is. The operating system of the Federal Republic is the Basic Law of 1949; federalism is hard-wired. Kicking a renegade state out of Germany is not a membership vote after dessert: it would be a not entirely impossible constitutional demolition job.

That is precisely why the mind bomb still works: any law not locked behind the eternity clause can be rewritten, if enough politicians seriously want the rewrite. Germans have a tremendous problem with that sentence, because they prefer the fairy tale in which the legal text more or less resembles God. The people with the hammer prefer the other fairy tale: that God himself can be amended in committee. Between these two stories sits Magdeburg, waiting to learn whether “solidarity” was a principle chiselled in stone or a ripcord.

The rest of the weather system

Reports of election irregularities are already circulating in the usual side channels. The AfD itself talks of pens being “guided” in nursing homes. Established Germany calls that Trump karaoke without evidence; alternative Germany calls the dismissal itself the evidence: both choirs will, by 7 September 2026 at the latest, be singing at full volume. Add the media climate: “Saxony-Anhalt” is being trained, day after day, to trigger the word “Nazi” before the sentence is finished. A large part of the country still treats Tagesschau and heute journal, the two great public-law evening rituals, as the official sky, not as a somewhat rusty, highly politicized editorial product. That is not magic. That is market share with a public-broadcasting halo. Add the intelligence services and the domestic security agencies. They plan for political shock the way fire brigades plan for fire: terror and chaos need not be invented from scratch each time, they only have to be turned up.

What a real break would have required

Changing anything structural in Germany is less a revolution than a festival of billed hours: first you hire lawyers, then still more lawyers to explain why the first lawyers were too optimistic. Rules are not suggestions, they are furniture. In this case very, very old, jammed-up furniture of every stuffing and colour, which really ought to be thrown out and replaced.

Anyone who actually wanted to puncture the information monopoly would need judges and courts willing to treat round-the-clock propaganda radio and the great evening rituals as something other than protected liturgy. Individual presenters with a nightly license to hypnotize — Markus Lanz is the national exhibit — would have to be told by a court, without delay, that propaganda and news are not the same costume. That would produce an immediate, ear-splitting scream for “freedom of the press”: the scream would be the point, because the counter-move would be to treat the scream, in advance, as a product for sale, not as a principle being defended. Virtually none of that is currently on the winners’ list.

The mind that cannot see Tuesday

The mind of Europe and of Germany is anachronistic: it curates the past under museum lighting and lives the present as a talk-show panel. The future is a genre it largely brackets out and does not watch. Germans are world champions of Aufarbeitung, the ritual working-through of yesterday, and world amateurs of Vorausschau, or anticipation: the unfashionable art of looking ahead. They can tell you, with great precision, how and where the last villa burned, and only very rarely who has reserved the next one. That is why the glasses are already clinking among the more naïve believers of the AfD, and of the BSW as well: they hear “42 percent” and translate it into “we have won.” That Berlin, Brussels, the Atlantic circuit and the newsrooms will treat a state election as a declaration of war, not as a regular transfer of power, they have elegantly failed to notice.

Noticed, however, was how the lead in The English Patient died beautifully in a villa, remembered everything, and changed nothing about the war still running outside the window. The German patient one the other hand is still under the blanket, waiting for the next heute journal  to tell him whether tomorrow has been approved.