Firewall compromised: has Friedrich Merz blown ‘democracy’s last shot’?

Many fear chancellor is wrong man for the job at a time when Germany's defences against far right are crumbling

A cataclysm. A 9.0 earthquake. A five-alarm fire. A bitter rejection of Germany's joyous reunification three decades ago, and a threat to the democratic postwar order.

Sizing up the repercussions of last weekend's win for the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party in the former communist state of Saxony-Anhalt, German commentators expressed a sense of doom, panic and helplessness in the political establishment.