Since 1949, Germany’s political system has been all but dominated by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), with fringe parties only ever claiming only tiny morsels of the electorate. In 2013, 67% of the country’s voters backed one of these two traditional governing parties. This number dropped to 53% in 2017 and to 50% in last month’s federal race that saw the SPD’s Olaf Scholz emerge as the likeliest next chancellor. This trend echoes similar developments across Europe, where traditional centre-right and centre-left forces have either imploded or lost considerable ground to insurgent rivals.  And yet unlike its European neighbors, Germany’s fragmentation has largely benefitted centrist alternatives rather than radical upstarts (so argued Tom Nuttall of The Economist and Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in the latest episode of Uncommon Decency). The far-left Die Linke and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland ...