Europe’s centre fears nationalist wave after AfD victory but only has itself to blame

Saxony-Anhalt win part of wider trend driven by mainstream policy failures and gradual normalisation of far right ideas

The numbers speak for themselves: Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), a party that dabbles in Nazi imagery, distinguishes between biological" and passport" Germans, and is too extreme even for France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen, nearly doubled its score in Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt to 43.8% of the vote.

Meanwhile, the centre-right CDU of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, collapsed to 17.2%, less than half its total in the same race five years ago, and the centre-left SPD - Germany's other main party of government for the past 60-odd years - scraped 9.3%. The least that can be said is that the centre did not hold.