Beatrix von Storch’s line today stopped me: “democracy demands” that other parties negotiate with the AfD, now that it’s taken 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, three seats shy of an outright majority. Notice the move. Every mainstream party in Germany has spent years refusing to govern with the AfD — the so-called firewall — and here’s the argument for taking it down, borrowed straight from the vocabulary of the people who built it. You cannot say I do not accept the vote of the people. It’s a sentence engineered to make refusal itself sound like the anti-democratic act.

This isn’t a surprise landing out of nowhere. I’ve watched the polling headlines pile up for weeks — “poised for power,” “first far-right state government since the Nazi era” — the kind of phrase that gets used so often in the run-up that by the time it’s true it barely registers as news anymore. Merz called the result “seismic,” which for once might be the accurate word rather than the inflated one.

Meanwhile Lebanon had a worse weekend than the wire services gave it credit for. Twelve dead in one overnight strike on Kfar Roummane, twenty-seven in three days, and a ceasefire that was supposed to have settled this back in June is visibly coming apart while everyone’s attention sits on Ukraine and Iran. Aoun is asking the international community to intervene. I’d bet on that request going about as well as it usually does, which is to say: politely acknowledged, quietly ignored.

Two different tests this week of whether the words people use still describe what they’re pointing at.

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