The AfD won voters away from all its mainstream rivals, winning over 82,000 voters who had previously supported the governing Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). But one of the more striking consequences of the Sept. 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt was that the AfD energized people who had stopped voting, and brought 170,000 of them—around a tenth of the local electorate—back to the ballot box. These are people who had largely given up on politics, and who, for years, have inhabited a parallel universe. Many of these voters regard Germany’s Nazi past as overblown and refuse to draw parallels between then and now. They also see centrist…
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