Far-right nationalist populist parties are making the running everywhere from Washington to Warsaw. So why be so alarmed about a little regional electoral victory for one such party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), in one federal state, Saxony-Anhalt? “Because it’s Germany!” is the almost instinctive answer in many heads around the world.

But that “because it’s Germany” needs to be taken apart, like the segments of an orange. Yes, because of Adolf Hitler, two dictatorships (Nazi Germany until 1945, communist-ruled East Germany until 1989) and two world wars. And yes, some of the language used by the AfD will give anyone familiar with Nazi rhetoric a cold shudder down the spine.

Then there’s the fact that Germany is Europe’s central power. The AfD’s national co-leader Alice Weidel says that when her party gets into government after the federal election scheduled for 2029, Germany will abandon the euro and leave the Schengen border-free travel area. What would be left of the EU then?

The great German liberal social and political thinker Ralf Dahrendorf, who died in 2009, told me more than once that he would only feel really confident of the resilience of German democracy when it had withstood the test of a big economic crisis. Well, the country is close to that now.

The final segment of “because it’s Germany!” is perhaps the most interesting. The federal republic’s entire constitutional, political and educational system is designed to prevent anything like the collapse of the Weimar republic into Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933. The federal republic should be a wehrhafte Demokratie – a democracy capable of defending itself.

So how Germany will defend its democracy is a question not just of European but of global significance. Looking at all the answers being frenetically canvassed in Berlin, I think the most convincing formula is: neither ban the AfD nor embrace it, but instead constrain it legally and........

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