Next month, three state elections will test whether Germany’s postwar consensus against governing with the far right will survive. On September 6, roughly two million voters in Saxony-Anhalt go to the polls; two weeks later, on September 20, they’ll be followed by voters in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the capital, Berlin.

In these first two contests, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is leading polls; in Berlin it is running second. In Saxony-Anhalt, it is far ahead, polling around 40 to 42 percent. It is within striking distance of an outright majority that would let it govern alone, something no far-right party has done in any German state since 1945.

The AfD is a party whose branches in several Eastern states have been formally classified by domestic intelligence agencies as “confirmed right-wing extremist.” Yet today, it tops nationwide polls and has opened up its widest-ever lead over Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU). Even in Berlin, a city that has never before been remotely within the AfD’s reach, it is now polling in the high teens, making it competitive for first place for the first time in the capital’s history.