Until this month, a far-right, openly ethnonationalist party had never come so close to winning an absolute majority in an election in the Federal Republic of Germany. Now that it has, and with similarly pro-Russian forces on the rise in France, all Europeans must prepare for the worst.
BERLIN—On September 6, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote in the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, falling just short of an absolute majority. For the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic, an openly ethnonationalist (indeed, racist) party, campaigning on a political platform that is ideologically adjacent to National Socialism, is close to gaining government power.
