Everyone's getting all worked up about Alternative for Germany. The standard narrative is that in three regional elections last weekend, Angela Merkel's refugee policy was rejected by a classic right-wing/populist protest movement (think Donald Trump), and that the German chancellor arrived at the latest EU summit Thursday in Brussels bruised at home and diminished abroad.

It's nonsense. The biggest result was that the Greens won big in Baden-Württemberg. Baden-Württemberg is a big deal — populous, rich, the home of Porsche, Daimler-Benz, and SAP. It's also iconic, the heartland of West German, Atlanticist, pro-European, Catholic, Christian Democracy.

Not only does the mythical "Swabian housewife" — frequently cited by Merkel as an example of old-fashioned frugality — hail from there, so does the very real Wolfgang Schäuble. The ordoliberal economic thinking the finance minister espouses began life here, at Freiburg University in the late 1940s. His father helped set up the regional liberal party. His brother, a local politician, ended up running the state brewery.

Not only are the "wrong" party in charge of the state, for the first time since it was created, but they're getting more powerful. The result won't be enough for the Greens to rule alone, but they will have their pick of coalition partners, dominate the agenda, and benefit from a massive media platform. For the CDU, it must be a disorienting and brutal experience.

But the CDU chieftain who lost the state did so by turning against Merkel. Guido Wolf swung to the right, aligning himself with Horst Seehofer and his Christian Social Union on an anti-immigration platform against the Green minister-president, Winfried Kretschmann, and Merkel. Now Wolf is a nobody.

Tellingly, the biggest single group of new Green voters are ex-conservatives. Polling suggests they approve of Merkel's migration policy (by as much as 76 percent) and disapprove of Wolf's disloyalty. Further north in Mainz, Julia Klöckner lost badly to the Social Democrats (SPD), having promised much and marketed herself as Merkel 2.0.

Away from Rhineland-Palatinate, the SPD failed horribly. AfD did well there, and in Saxony-Anhalt, but not well enough for real power, making Sunday a horrible night for Merkel's critics. Again and again, grey Catholic men from the Rhineland, or those who share their politics, try to topple the chancellor and fail.

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What's going on here? Somewhat as Bismarck did in the 19th century, when the founder of the German Empire expanded the franchise to bring in hordes of Catholics and social democrats to the new Reichstag, Merkel is a master of the politics of triangulation — call it the diagonal dance — that finds compromise between opposing poles to create a new, diagonal, cross-cutting line between new poles. Only an indispensable leader can pull that off.

We see it with Merkel. With her move away from nuclear power, Merkel turned against the CDU's technocratic, NATO-infused soul and opened up to the Greens, liberals, and the greener bits of the SPD and the Left.

After the economic crisis, she pivoted away from the SPD and emphasized an economic liberal course in a brief coalition with the liberal Free Democrats, running against the CDU's more CDU-like tendencies. This was only a brief flirtation; the real coup de théâtre was going back to the grand coalition with the SPD, but very much on her terms. Merkel leapt to the left, with the minimum wage and the rent brake, while looking the right in the eye on eurozone politics.

This has placed the SPD in an awkward position. Their commitment to the euro denies them an economic critique, while their ministerial portfolios deny them a social critique because they are responsible for social policy in its entirety. The same goes for foreign policy.

With the SPD's polling numbers in the toilet, leaving government means abandoning their people to whoever replaces them. The worst of it is that it's a comfortable, acceptable sort of captivity. Their influence is real, as are the official Mercedes, but they are reduced to being Merkel's social affairs wing.

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In terms of diagonal politics, Merkel's #refugeeswelcome stance represents the deliberate creation of a new binary opposition. Merkel defines a new division, between globalists, or at least Europeans, and nationalists or — thinking about extreme-right protest group Pegida's profoundly local base — regionalists.

She addresses the globalist/European-minded SPD mainstream, the FDP, the Greens, and the centrist side of the CDU; she therefore puts the AfD, the Left party, the CSU, and indeed everyone else in a box with the people who set fire to emergency hostels for refugees. In fact, the emergence of the AfD even serves her purpose, in that it highlights the division.

This costs the CDU as a party, but Bismarck didn't care about parties and neither does Merkel. The CDU doesn't care for her, either. They have no choice but to follow as best they can. Winfried Kretschmann's version of the Greens is an absolutely viable coalition partner, and an absolutely viable competitor for naturally centrist-conservative voters. Both the SPD and the CDU know it, and are therefore disciplined by it. The dancer Merce Cunningham wisely said that to dance is to change direction, and another dizzying alteration of course could happen at any time.

You can't throw yourself about without a stable footing somewhere. You can't run against your own party for too long unless you make it worth their while — this is the flip side of diagonal politics.

The price of Merkel's dazzling turns is the unwavering commitment to Schäuble economics. The standing leg is planted, smack in the middle of CDU politics, with at least 90 degrees of turnout ... and it's the right leg. (Logically, she must be facing France and Brussels while turning her back on Russia.)

The journalists wait, endlessly, for the plot to move on. Any event is scrutinized for the beginning of the end. But Merkel can keep this up indefinitely, barring some very literal biological injury.

The CDU clumps comically along behind her, the SPD is stuck on its irrelevant pedestal, the AfD acts as a sort of barbarian chorus, we wait for the Greens' big moment. The crowd is delighted by the drama and spectacle. The critics are always shocked anew by the commanding stage presence. Those who have tried it themselves are hushed by the mastery of technique, and the frank display of power.

But where is the show going? Is there a plot? Are we meant to be moved? It remains difficult to say what will endure of the Merkel years, other than a decade of peace, for everyone but a couple of thousand volunteers for an Afghanistan campaign already being lost in history, and prosperity, as long as you're German, preferably a blond, male Facharbeiter, and not in a Hartz-IV workfare placement.

But then, Angela Merkel is meant to be a conservative politician.

Alex Harrowell writes the Yorkshire Ranter and blogs at A Fistful of Euros.