Alice Weidel did not hide it. In a summer interview with German public television, the AfD leader laid out the plan without a single softening: leave the euro, close the borders, exit Schengen. Three sentences that take apart the entire architecture of the European project Germany spent seventy years building.

On the currency she claims "Germany was considerably better off before the euro was introduced" - in her view the common currency weakened the German economy and reduced household wealth. On borders she was even shorter: "We will close them and leave Schengen." Plus mass deportations, stricter citizenship rules and the abolition of asylum protection for Syrians.

This is not a fringe party shouting from the back row. Ahead of the 6 September election in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is polling above 40 percent. Nationally it stands at 27 percent - five points ahead of Friedrich Merz's CDU, which has 22. Weidel also said the part that stings most: "We will govern in the first federal states. And we will govern at federal level."

Who opened the door

The party that started in 2013 as an academic, eurosceptic initiative against the Greek bailout is today a nationalist force on the right. Between those two points sits a decade in which the mainstream parties held to a strategy of boycott - no cooperation, no conversation, a wall. The result of that wall is a party on 27 percent.

For Macedonia this is not a distant German topic. Schengen is not an abstraction for anyone who has waited at a border crossing, and the euro is the currency in which both the wages of people working abroad and the prices at home are calculated. When the second largest party in the EU's biggest economy openly says it wants to dismantle both, the question is not whether that happens tomorrow - the question is what is left of the promise we have been waiting on for twenty years.

Weidel is an economist, a former Goldman Sachs employee, and speaks Mandarin. She is no street figure, and that is exactly the point: her votes do not come from the margins but from voters who believe the mainstream is not listening to them. A familiar scene?