Is German democracy under threat (again)?

Germany's President Frank Walter-Steinmeier (SPD) got into hot waters for invoking history to make a case against the AfD. Was he right to do so?

Dear Reader,

The 9th of November is arguably the most important day in modern German history.

Known as Schicksalstag (Day of Fate), it marks four pivotal moments when democracy was born, threatened, destroyed — and reborn again.

On November 9th, 1918, two days before the armistice that ended World War I, the Weimar Republic was proclaimed from a balcony of the Reichstag — for the first time in German history the people were the sovereign. But, just five years later, on that same date in 1923, the fragility of the new republic was laid bare as Adolf Hitler and his followers marched through Munich in a failed coup attempt.

The same date would haunt Germany again. On November 9th, 1938 — Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass — Nazi paramilitaries and ordinary citizens unleashed state-sanctioned terror against Jews, shattering the last illusions of a democratic Germany.

Half a century later, on November 9th, 1989, the story of Schicksalstag seemed to come full circle: the Berlin Wall fell, …