BERLIN — Berlin's markets brim with the rich pickings of harvest. Picking up her weekly shopping, pensioner Ute Istock quips that the choice of apple varieties is as broad as that of candidates on the ballot sheets in last month's city election — adding that this is not necessarily a good thing.
"Voting has become tricky," Istock admits. "It's no longer clear how a party will end up governing effectively because there are too many parties and forming viable majorities is becoming impossible."
Germany's political center is fighting for relevance after recent electoral gains for the far-right and the far-left.
Istock reveals she voted for the far-left Die Linke party for the first time because she feels the centrist parties are out of touch.
"Voters no longer feel represented by the political center," she says. "This is why we're voting in such a confrontational way."
This confrontational voting sits uncomfortably with Istock and other German voters because increasing political fragmentation, unstable coalitions and a dire economy echo a past that led to the rise of fascism almost a century ago.
It also sits uncomfortably with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) were trounced in the Berlin elections and suffered their worst-ever result in a state election held the same day.
"Trust in state institutions is declining," Merz said minutes after exit polls were announced. "And radical parties on both the left and the right are exploiting this."
Merz's conservatives govern together with the center-left Social Democrats in a coalition of what used to be two big-tent parties with significantly different political positions. They now rely on each other for increasingly slim majorities, and governing together is making the parties appear less distinguishable.
A prominent Social Democrat, Matthias Mirsch, recently complained in parliament how reductive political discourse has become.
He was speaking after the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a landslide victory in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt.
"It's damn difficult to govern in these times," Mirsch said, "where things quickly boil down to yes or no, black or white, and the middle ground doesn't count."
Berlin-based communications adviser Maximilian Flügge blames this narrowing of debate and a shrinking political center on the medium conveying the messages.
"Algorithms are simply not made for the political center. Algorithms are trained to promote outrage," he explains. "The political center relies on nuance and compromise — neither of which goes viral on social media."
Despite his party's recent electoral defeats, Merz remains defiant amid speculation that he might be replaced. He insists he'll push on with the tax and welfare reforms he says are needed to jumpstart Germany's economy.
After some soul — and strategy — searching, Merz has admitted that citing statistics alone won't sell it: "We must try — I myself included — to reach people on an emotional level," he told journalists in a recent press conference.
Flügge says Merz's centrist government is too negative in messaging about its reform agenda — in stark contrast to the far-right AfD, which promises voters that "everything is possible!"
But part of that vision includes so-called "remigration" — a policy that advocates deporting people on a massive scale, including immigrants with German citizenship.
And while Merz may struggle to explain his own party's vision, he doesn't hold back when describing the far-right's policies.
"The word 'remigration' is nothing more than a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin color," Merz recently told lawmakers in the Bundestag.
His assertion prompted applause. But it also prompted jeers from the sizable AfD opposition.
Their leader, Alice Weidel, now claims that it is the AfD that is Germany's new big tent party.
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