Germany has a new political landscape and that's not a metaphor - it is a statistical fact. Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party considered marginal five years ago, is now the first choice of 27 percent of Germans. The CDU/CSU bloc of Chancellor Friedrich Merz dropped two percentage points and now sits at 24 percent. For the first time in modern German history, a far-right party leads in national polls.

The numbers are shameful for the government. Only 13 percent of Germans are satisfied with the work of the current CDU/CSU-SPD bloc. That is one of the lowest approval ratings ever recorded in the Deutschlandtrend survey. Merz himself gets a 16 percent rating - the lowest rating in history for a sitting chancellor. 69 percent of Germans think Merz is not up to the position. When a politician gets numbers like that, every political-scientist take is superfluous - the citizens have already spoken.

The other numbers complete the picture of a fragmented German politics: SPD 14 percent, Greens 12 percent, Die Linke 11 percent. None of the old big parties has a dominant position. When you add it up, no stable coalition is possible without or with AfD - the party everyone has so far insisted they will not negotiate with.

For the Balkans this is not just German news. Germany is the biggest trade partner of Macedonia, Serbia, the whole of Southeast Europe. When Berlin shakes, Skopje shakes. The economic consequences of political instability in Germany pour into investments that do not arrive, projects that get postponed, and jobs in German factories that Balkans citizens build. Is that reason for a Balkan reader to worry? Probably more than they themselves want to admit.

And the question increasingly being raised in European circles is simple: what happens when a party that European mainstream politics treated as illegitimate gets 27 percent in national polls? It is no longer possible to claim it is "marginal". It is no longer possible to ignore it either. And if this is what Germans vote for, then the question is not how to stop the AfD - it is why the current political elite has become so irrelevant to its own voters.