The strange thing about the east German elections is that the far-right won it, and the far-left ends up holding the balance of power. This is what Germany and France have in common. Nobody wanted to partner up with the far-right, and in the process created an unbelievable mess.

Earlier this month the far-right Alternative for Germany won a state election for the first time ever. It won over 30 percent of the seats in two east German state election. In Thuringia it came first. It Saxony, it ended up in second place after the Christian Democrats. The AfD is now the dominant political force in eastern Germany. It stands to do well in another east German state election later this month. The polls predicted the result fairly accurately, and yet political Germany is in shock. The right is on the march, and no one has a clue how to stop them.

Amongst far-right parties in Europe, the AfD is scarier than most. It is not a Nazi party, but it has politicians with neo-Nazis contacts. Unlike Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni, the AfD wants Germany to leave the EU and the euro. And it does not just want to stop new immigrants. It wants to send the ones already there back home.

The big fear hanging over Berlin this week is that what happened in Thuringia on Sunday could one day happen in Berlin, perhaps not at next year’s election, but the one after that.

For now, there is a soothing consolation. Despite its victory, the AfD may not end up forming a government. That would require an absolute majority of seats in the parliament, for which it would need coalition partners. But all the parties have erected what they called a political firewall against the AfD – a do-or-die promise not to form a coalition with them.

But if not the AfD, who else can form a government? Should former Communists, pro-Putin populists, Christian Democrats and Greens get together and govern in a rainbow coalition? It is not entirely impossible to imagine that it might happen. But the chances of such a coalition to succeed are next to zero.

The CDU has built not just one firewall but the three. The second one is against the Left Party. Recently, they added another one against Sahra Wagenknecht, a maverick politician who broke away from the Left Party to form her own group, BSW. The trigger for the firewall was her walkout in the Bundestag, when the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski addressed the chamber. Wagenknecht is a politician of the left with themes of the right. Her biggest campaign theme is an end to weapons deliveries for Ukraine. She is an unapologetic defender of the Nord Streat Baltic Sea pipeline.

She got 12 percent of the vote in Saxony, and 16 percent in Thuringia. For a party that is not even one year old, her results are spectacular. In Thuringia she is holding the balance of power. In Saxony, it will be possible but difficult for the other parties to govern with her support. It could be that this is the first firewall to crack.  Nationwide, she is polling between 7 and 9 percent.

I have at this point not even mentioned Olaf Scholz and his government. It is as though he and his government hardly matter to German politics anymore. The three coalition partners in Berlin were the big losers. Scholz’ centre-left Social Democrats barely made it above the 5 percent threshold, needed to for a party to be represented in a parliament. The Greens surpassed the hurdle in Saxony, but not in Thuringia. The liberal FDP failed both with a vote share of around 1 percent. The government parties in Berlin have disappeared as a political force in eastern Germany.

For now, the situation in Berlin falls into the hopeless but not serious category. It looks like they will limp on for another year. The interesting question is not whether they could be early elections. More interesting is what will happen afterwards.

AfD and Wagenknecht together account for over 25% of the national polls. In practice, this would give them around one third of the seats. The leaves the centrist parties that account for the remaining two thirds to form a governing coalition amongst each other. Of the five centrist political parties, it might require four to form a coalition. This is the political downside of the firewalls. They turn coalitions into musical chair arrangements of the same parties. It is no wonder that the extreme parties flourish in such an environment. They are the only real opposition.

Beside the rise of the far-right and the far-left, the other big shift that is taking place in German politics is the rightward lurch of Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader. He has aggressively adopted the AfD’s anti-immigration theme as his own. The goal is to win back voters that deserted the CDU for the AfD. A recent terror attack in the west German town of Solingen, allegedly committed by a Syrian refugee, prompted Merz to call for the re-introduction of border controls. That would be a version of a mini-Brexit. It would kill one of the EU’s proudest achievements, the Schengen zone of passport free travel.

I personally find this anti-immigration rhetoric appalling. But leaving that aside, I struggle to see how this could work for Merz. As Marine Le Pen once said about the French centre-right copying her policy: why go for the imitation when you can have the real thing? The CDU lacks credibility as anti-immigration party. It was Angela Merkel, the former chancellor and CDU leader, who famously opened Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees in 2015. That cause the biggest flow of immigration in modern German history. Merz is cautious not to offend Merkel loyalists in his party, and amongst his voters. He is not credible as an immigration hardliner. It has been the overriding experience of the centre-right in several European countries – in the UK, France and Italy for example – that immigration is not such a great campaign theme for them.

I just finished a book, with the title Kaput, to be published by Swift Press in early November, in which I chronicle the story of Germany’s economic decline. That’s the theme I would advise Merz to focus on, not immigration. What happened is that Germany bet the house on a few industries that all went into simultaneous decline. The most dramatic is the car industry. Successive government failed to invest into digital technologies. Within a few decades Germany transformed itself from high-tech leader to digital Luddite.

The irony about the AfD and Wagenknecht is that they both yearn for the days of smokestack industries, and yet they are creatures of the digital age. The AfD has the most followers on TikTok of any German political party. Amongst state MPs on TikTok, the SPD had 290,000 likes, the CDU 914,000 and the AfD 17.8 million. Amongst young voters, the AfD is the most popular party.

It is not a daredevil prediction that one day, some of the old parties will be gone. The firewalls cannot protect them from the voters – and the progression of time. The smartest strategy would be to expose the AfD by co-opting them as a junior coalition partner.

The reason why German parties refuse to co-operate with the far right is historical: German nationalists and conservatives misjudged Adolf Hitler when they formed a coalition with him in 1933, and later handed him emergency powers to rule without parliament. But what triggered the rise of Hitler was a political, economic and moral breakdown of an entire system. The situation in Germany todays, whilst not great, is not comparable to that of 1933.

Firewalls are the embodiment of fear. The Germans fear the right, and the left. They fear China, and Donald Trump. As they kept on building firewalls, the ended building the biggest one of them all, the one against progress and modernity.