In response, Merkel announced that she would not run for re-election as head of her center-right party — a separate position from the chancellorship — and that she would retire from politics in 2021. Many observers think the turmoil may lead to new elections and the end of her tenure well before 2021.

Merkel’s departure is an opportunity for the political center, argues Anna Sauerbrey of the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel in The Times. “Merkel’s stepping aside may prove the beginning of a revival of political discourse in Germany, and a much-needed resolution about where the country is headed.”

Even more so, though, Germany’s politics point to an opportunity for the left. The party that finished third in Hesse — well ahead of the far right — was the Green Party. And Germany’s Greens have fared well in other recent elections, too. They are showing how a left-leaning message can resonate in these anti-establishment times — much as Bernie Sanders did in the 2016 Democratic primary.

“The key point is that the Greens offer a certain outsider independence,” The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg writes.

He continues: “Which raises the prospect that outsiderness, not nationalism or xenophobia, has been the main factor drawing voters to the [far right]. The Greens’ story tends to support a theory that fringe politics is more about the politics than about the fringe — that voters care more about taking a sledgehammer to ossified political systems than about the particular views of the politicians swinging the hammer.”

Still, the decline of the center brings huge risks. “Since the end of World War II, liberal democratic ideas have been hegemonic,” Yascha Mounk of Harvard told Newsweek’s Cristina Maza. The decline of the political center means “we may be approaching a tipping point at which democratic ideas are no longer sufficiently popular, and that could have big consequences.”

In The Times. My colleague Michelle Alexander writes about using reincarnation to think about climate change, and Nick Kristof continues his work on gun safety by writing about the N.R.A. in the wake of Pittsburgh.

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