MAGDEBURG — Germany’s political firewall did not collapse on Sunday. It became visible.

Alternative for Germany won 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its previous share and finishing 26.6 points ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats. The CDU, which had led the state for 24 years, fell to 17.2 percent. AfD stopped just short of a parliamentary majority, leaving Germany with an arithmetically intact cordon sanitaire and a political result that makes the cordon look very small.

The distinction matters. Most other parties still refuse to govern with AfD, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classifies as extremist. But excluding it from the state government may require cooperation among the CDU, Social Democrats, Greens, Left Party and the BSW—a five-party arrangement spanning positions that ordinarily treat one another as the opposition. The Associated Press reports that AfD would need only three lawmakers from elsewhere to defect for a majority.

This is the new geometry of the German firewall. It no longer describes a broad democratic center keeping a marginal force outside. In Saxony-Anhalt it may describe several diminished parties assembling behind a line while the largest party stands on the other side.

AfD’s candidate for governor, Ulrich Siegmund, immediately pressed that contradiction. He argued that more than 44 percent had voted for change and should receive it. His party’s slogan at its election-night gathering—“it starts here”—was calibrated for a state of only 2.1 million people but an audience far beyond it.

The result is historic without yet being decisive. No far-right or right-wing populist party has led a German national, state or major-city government in the postwar era. AfD has now won the votes necessary to approach that threshold, but not necessarily the partners or seats required to cross it. Coalition negotiations may take weeks. A government excluding AfD remains possible. So does an arrangement involving AfD and the left-populist BSW, though their points of agreement do not erase their substantial differences.

The electoral damage reaches Berlin before any government forms in Magdeburg. Merz’s CDU lost roughly half its support from the previous state election. AfD is already the largest opposition party in the federal parliament, and Saxony-Anhalt has converted its national ambition into a practical test: can every other party keep promising never to cooperate with it while presenting a five-way coalition as coherent government?

That question is not an endorsement of AfD’s program, including its hard restrictions on immigration, pro-Russian orientation and opposition to support for Ukraine. It is the institutional question produced by the count. A firewall can determine who does not govern. It cannot, by itself, supply a common budget, economic program or account of why so many voters crossed toward it.

The parties assembling on Monday therefore face two negotiations. The formal one is over seats, ministries and a viable majority. The more consequential one is with an electorate that has just demonstrated the limit of exclusion as a complete political strategy.

The wall remains standing. On Sunday, it contained 56.2 percent of the vote—but divided among nearly everyone else.

JAKARTA — Anak Krakatau’s 25-hour continuous eruption ended Sunday. On Monday, eight airports remained closed.

That gap between the physical event and the system’s recovery is the real scale of the disaster. Indonesia’s Geological Agency said the volcano was still producing moderate intermittent eruptions, dark ash and small localized earthquakes. Air-navigation tests continued to find volcanic ash around Jakarta and other cities. Authorities kept Soekarno-Hatta, Halim Perdanakusuma and six other airports shut until at least Monday evening.

At four airports operated by state-owned InJourney Airports, the interruption had affected about 2,300 flights and 268,539 passengers. Schools across ash-affected parts of Jakarta, West Java, Banten and Lampung moved classes online. The government also warned of volcanic bombs, heavy ashfall and possible lava flows if sustained activity resumes.

Modern aviation is built to make distance boring. Aircraft, crews and passengers move through interlocking rotations in which a plane landing in Jakarta becomes someone else’s departure hours later. Ash does not merely cancel the flight beneath it; it removes aircraft from later routes, displaces crews and fills terminals with people whose replacement seats may not exist for days.

The eruption demonstrated the odd mismatch between spectacle and consequence. A lava fountain and a boom reportedly heard 700 kilometers away ended on Sunday. Monday’s crisis was quieter: flight boards, grounded metal and microscopic abrasive particles suspended in airspace.

Anak Krakatau remains active, and officials say further eruptions are likely. But even if the volcano now goes still, the timetable will keep erupting. Networks remember shocks longer than mountains make them.

The Strait of Hormuz now has competing military claims, competing boundaries and, after Sunday, competing accounts of whether a strike happened at all.

Iranian state media said its forces hit an uncrewed American military vessel attempting to enter an area Tehran considers restricted. U.S. Central Command denied the report, calling it a “total lie.” Neither account, as reported by the Associated Press, supplied publicly verifiable evidence settling the dispute.

The disagreement arrived one day after the United States said it struck three Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for Iranian ballistic missiles launched at U.S. warships. Iran’s new security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, also said Tehran intends to announce an exclusion zone extending from what he described as the line of the American naval blockade toward Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf. Details remain sparse.

The absence of a shared account does not make the episode less dangerous. It makes escalation harder to measure. A confirmed strike has an object, damage and an identifiable threshold. A claimed strike denied by its target can still be used domestically as proof of resolve, while the denial preserves freedom to avoid—or delay—a public response.

Commercial markets must price the physical risk even while governments dispute the fact pattern. Brent crude rose to $97.50 a barrel in Asian trading Monday. Hormuz is not only a battlefield boundary; it is a passage central to global energy supply.

Exclusion zones normally clarify which movement will trigger enforcement. This proposed zone begins amid disagreement over where restrictions already apply and whether a vessel inside them was hit. The line is being drawn before the public can establish what happened at the last one.

Asian markets opened Monday with two convictions that do not sit comfortably together: artificial-intelligence infrastructure will keep expanding, and the Gulf may keep burning.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 gained 2.1 percent and South Korea’s Kospi jumped 4.6 percent. Samsung Electronics rose 5.3 percent, SK Hynix 8.1 percent, and Japanese chip-linked names including Renesas, Rohm and Tokyo Electron advanced. Hong Kong fell 0.8 percent and mainland China was nearly flat, making the enthusiasm conspicuously concentrated.

At the same time, Brent crude added $1.22 to reach $97.50 a barrel after renewed U.S.-Iran attacks around the Strait of Hormuz. Oil was not confirming a serene growth outlook. It was pricing the risk that a military contest could reach energy supply.

Calling the session simply “risk-on” misses the construction of the bet. Investors bought the suppliers most directly associated with AI capital spending and also bought the commodity most directly exposed to geopolitical disruption. The first position assumes corporate demand will remain powerful. The second acknowledges that the route between producer and customer may become more expensive.

This is what passes for diversification in a narrow market: own the machines for the future and the fuel surcharge for getting there.

The chip rally may prove durable; memory manufacturers benefit from real demand and constrained high-end supply. But Monday’s breadth matters. A market led by a small group of hardware companies while oil approaches three figures is not broadcasting uncomplicated confidence. It is paying for growth and danger in adjacent columns of the same ledger.

The most useful AI indicator on Monday was not a benchmark, a model launch or a generated video. It was an 8.1 percent rise in the shares of SK Hynix.

Samsung Electronics gained 5.3 percent, and chip-equipment and component companies in Japan rose with it. The rally underscores a change in where investors believe the durable value of artificial intelligence sits: less in the abundance of applications, more in the scarce physical components required to run them.

AI systems do not consume “compute” as an abstraction. They require accelerators to perform matrix operations, high-bandwidth memory to keep those processors supplied with data, packaging to connect the parts and electrical infrastructure to operate the finished racks. A bottleneck anywhere in that chain can determine how many systems ship and what they cost.

That gives memory suppliers an enviable position. Software features can be copied, bundled or discounted. Fabrication capacity and advanced packaging take factories, equipment, qualified processes and time. The market’s enthusiasm is therefore not necessarily a judgment that every AI product will make money. It is a judgment that the attempt will require a great deal of specialized hardware.

There is a warning embedded in the same prices. When an industry’s “dependable growth pulse” comes from a small hardware complex, the technology market becomes hostage to capacity plans made years earlier and capital budgets that must remain enormous. The AI boom increasingly resembles an industrial buildout, with industrial cyclicality waiting behind it.

The interface may be a conversation. The business underneath is inventory.

The North Sea has suffered an image problem. From shore it is often a steel-grey expanse with none of the turquoise advertising enjoyed by tropical reefs. Beneath that surface, cinematographer Peter van Rodijnen and director Mark Verkerk found an ensemble: basking sharks, seals, bluefin tuna, orcas, kelp forests and shorthorn sculpins tending neon-pink eggs.

Their documentary, *North Sea, Nature Untamed*, took seven years to shoot and draws on roughly two decades of Van Rodijnen’s diving. Four out of five planned dives were cancelled, the filmmakers told the Guardian, defeated by rough conditions. Plankton blooms that feed the ecosystem also destroy underwater visibility; cold, currents and depth can reduce a dive to 20 or 30 minutes of usable filming.

The difficulty supplies the film’s aesthetic argument. The North Sea is not empty because it looks opaque. It is alive in ways the camera has been technically unable to flatter.

The film also refuses the easy fiction that wildlife occupies a world without people. It visits fishing vessels, records bycatch and shows the industrial scale of mackerel harvesting. It listens to the underwater pounding of wind-farm construction, then dives artificial rock formations where marine life has established itself and fishing restrictions have created accidental refuges.

That mixture—damage, adaptation and compromised coexistence—is more interesting than another immaculate wilderness presented as if humans exist outside the frame. Van Rodijnen opposes bottom trawling and bycatch but resists turning the entire sea into one protected area. The documentary’s subject is not purity. It is a working ecosystem full of competing appetites.

Its best special effect may simply be persistence: returning to brown water until it finally permits a portrait.

The week’s streaming menu arrives with the clean efficiency of a corporate ancestry search. *Call My Agent!* has become a movie. *The Paper*, itself descended from *The Office*, returns for a second season. A multiplayer game extracts another product from *Halloween*. Carole Radziwill returns to *The Real Housewives of New York City* eight years after leaving. Meanwhile, 2000s rock bands are resurfacing through soundtracks and algorithms.

None of these things is automatically bad. *Call My Agent!* earned affection by being fleet, specific and gloriously vain about show business. A good revival can recover characters abandoned too soon. An old song finding young listeners is one of popular culture’s happier accidents.

But taken together, the schedule reveals the platforms’ governing aesthetic: recognition before curiosity. The viewer should understand the thumbnail before pressing play. A title no longer needs only a premise; it needs ancestry.

This changes what nostalgia does. It once arrived after a culture had moved on, softening the edges of a finished period. Streaming makes it concurrent and industrial. The recent past is continuously mined, updated and returned before anyone can properly miss it.

The risk is not merely repetition. It is that familiarity becomes the admission price for invention. New performers, writers and directors enter through inherited formats because a recognizable property can survive a commissioning meeting. Culture then acquires the shape of a mall renovated without changing its anchor stores.

Watch the revival if it is good. Play the slasher game if it is fun. But the most valuable title in any weekly carousel is the one that cannot summarize its corporate family tree.

The phrase “political firewall” flatters the people standing behind it. A firewall sounds engineered, modern and final. It says the danger has been identified and contained.

Saxony-Anhalt has exposed the metaphor’s weakness. AfD won 43.8 percent. The parties refusing to govern with it may still construct a majority, but possibly only through an extraordinary five-party coalition. That would be constitutionally ordinary and politically awkward: the firewall would hold by turning nearly every disagreement on its protected side into a secondary matter.

Exclusion can be necessary without being sufficient. Parties are entitled to decide that another party’s personnel or program makes coalition government impossible. Voters are equally entitled to notice when “we will not work with them” becomes the clearest proposition those parties share.

A cordon answers a parliamentary question: who can assemble a government? It does not answer why the CDU lost roughly half its vote, why AfD more than doubled its share or what common program binds the parties now contemplating cooperation. Treating those questions as variations of the same moral emergency makes the coalition arithmetic easier to defend and the electoral result harder to understand.

The temptation will be to call the vote anomalous: one eastern state, 2.1 million people, unusually favorable ground for AfD. Yet a firewall designed for marginal parties cannot be evaluated as though 43.8 percent were marginal. Its continued legal operation is not proof of political success.

If the other parties form a government, their most important task will not be performing their distance from AfD. The distance is already obvious. They must demonstrate that the territory on their side contains something more coherent than mutual refusal.

Walls buy time. Governments must decide what the time is for.