By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
MAGDEBURG — Maryam and her best friend were walking to the train station the morning after, still turning over what had happened the night before. "Don't laugh at me," she told the Guardian, "but I wish we could go back to the days of Angela Merkel, when things were OK in Germany."
What happened was this: the far-right Alternative für Deutschland swept to a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt's state election, a result the Guardian's reporting places among the party's strongest ever. France's European affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, called it "a very grave moment for Europe." The shock wasn't confined to Germany. In England, hundreds of black-clad activists fought police for a second straight night along the south coast in Portsmouth, trying to block migrant arrivals, according to the Guardian. Officers used batons and synthetic pepper spray to hold the line, and a policing minister said several officers were injured repelling what she called organized "aggression."
The two events aren't officially connected, but they read like the same story told twice — a rising current of anti-immigrant politics moving through Europe's mainstream and its streets at the same time.
Against that backdrop, Britain's Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was set to announce a broad reset of UK relations with Israel, promising a more active British role backing the Palestinian cause, the Guardian reported — a separate but pointed signal of where London wants to stand as the continent's politics shift under it.
What comes next in Germany — coalition talks, a national reckoning, or simple normalization — is not yet resolved. The Guardian's Tuesday briefing posed the question directly: what happens next after a far-right breakthrough this large? Nobody in Magdeburg had an answer Tuesday morning. They just had the walk to the station, and the news.
— Compiled from reporting by the Guardian.
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