Midterm electoral verdicts on incumbent administrations can be unsparing. But elections this month in Germany’s Bavaria and Hesse states were notable for delivering a particularly savage one on the country’s governing “traffic-light” Coalition. In the red corner, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) recorded the party’s worst ever results in both states. The Greens’ share of the vote also fell alarmingly. The smallest party in the coalition, the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), barely troubled the scorers in Bavaria and failed to meet the threshold required to be represented in the state parliament. Depressingly, the most eye-catching beneficiary of this collective humiliation was the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which did well in both races. In Hesse, running on a net-zero-sceptic and anti-immigration agenda, it won close to 20% of the vote – its best performance in a western German state. Much of the explanation for these dismal results lies in the unwieldy and sometimes contradictory politics of the first three-party government in German history. Over the past year, Mr Scholz has struggled to keep …

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