43.8 percent for the Alternative for Germany. 17.2 percent for the CDU. Those are the numbers from the Saxony-Anhalt election, and the gap between them is wider than anything German post-war politics was prepared to imagine. The party that was the establishment in that state for decades has halved its own support from 2021.

Angela Merkel, chancellor for sixteen years and a CDU member throughout, called the result "a real turning point". Her words were sharper than plain electoral arithmetic: "When you see it in black and white on Sunday evening, then it is shocking." And then the sentence that says more than any analysis - "As a CDU member, my heart is bleeding."

The diagnosis she made herself

Merkel did not stop at regret. She pointed out that the AfD dominates social media and the traditional parties do not. "It is not enough to broadcast slogans from Konrad Adenauer Haus," she said - meaning her own party's headquarters.

That is a rarity: a politician who after a defeat blames not the voter but her own communication. Usually the order runs the other way - first the media are blamed, then the "manipulated" voters, and in the end nobody.

Merkel ruled out cooperation with the AfD, but also warned that talking about that party excessively, including the "firewall" rhetoric, helps it more than it harms it. In other words: the more you talk about someone, the more they exist.

The reaction and what comes after it

The results brought thousands of people onto the streets across Germany, with the largest gathering at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A protest after an election is legitimate and understandable, but the votes have already been counted - a demonstration does not change them.

The question that remains is a different one: what does a party do when it loses half its voters and its longest-serving leader tells it the problem is how it talks. Germany will carry the answer to that question for longer than one electoral cycle - and Europe, the Balkans included, will live with its consequences.