Tonight Germany stands on the brink of its biggest political crisis since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not since 1945 has a nationalist party of the hard-Right won power at state level in the Federal Republic. Now the Alternative for Germany (AfD) may be about to take over in Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany.
In a stunning election result, exit polls show that the AfD has outperformed predictions with 44.5 per cent, more than twice as many votes as the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU).
While the AfD is predicted to fall just three seats short of an absolute majority, it will be extremely difficult for the other parties, which range from far-Left to centre-Right, to maintain their “firewall” against the nationalists.
Everything will depend on the final results. Once the votes are counted, if all five of the smaller parties remain above the 5 per cent threshold, they could in theory form a coalition to keep the AfD out. More likely, though, is a minority coalition government of CDU and Social Democrats, tolerated by the Left and the Greens.
Chancellor Merz, already deeply unpopular, has been humiliated and left fighting for his political life. He faces further defeats in forthcoming state elections later this month and an ailing economy that shows few signs of recovery.
When members of the legislature take their seats in Magdeburg, the new state premier will be elected by secret ballot – which opens up the possibility that a few MPs from other parties will vote for Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader, enabling him to take office anyway.
The AfD triumph in Saxony-Anhalt will send shockwaves through the European political establishment, confounding their claim that the populist wave was ebbing across the Continent. The AfD, a fringe party just a decade ago, now leads the polls in Western Germany as well as its eastern heartland.
In Moscow, Vladimir Putin will be popping bottles of Crimean champagne at the news. The AfD is stubbornly pro-Russian and wants sanctions lifted immediately. Nine out of ten of its voters think Berlin has been far too generous to Ukraine.
The AfD has built its support mainly by campaigning against immigration. There is now a consensus that Angela Merkel made a mistake by opening the floodgates to refugees from the Middle East in 2015.
But as its support grows, so the AfD has become more extreme. It openly advocates “remigration”, not only for illegal migrants but also for all those who refuse to integrate and instead lead “parallel lives”. Its leaders are hostile to any “alien” culture that does not conform to their notion of German identity – especially Islam.
Although the spectre of mass deportations from German soil inevitably evokes memories of the Third Reich, the rise of the AfD does not mean that history is repeating itself. Most AfD voters are not neo-Nazis, but underdogs who feel patronised by the bigwigs in Berlin.
Friedrich Merz knows that it is mainly younger voters whom he must win back from the AfD. He now has months rather than years to deliver his promised “prosperity for all generations”. As a septuagenarian multimillionaire, he will struggle to convince the angry young men who have just defied him. And the wolf is now at the door.