The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is something of a backwater. Otto von Bismarck is said to have quipped that, if the world was about to end, he would move to Mecklenburg as it would take a further 50 years for the apocalypse to arrive there. Yet the election to its state legislature put this rural corner of northeastern Germany at the heart of a long-overdue debate.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) finished third in Sunday’s poll behind the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany and the Social Democrats (SPD).
The question is how to deal with the AfD now it is here to stay. The difficulty is that this is a party to which many of the usual rules of German political life do not seem to apply.