Fractured politics and the rise of populist parties means Germany’s democracy is facing its “toughest test in recent decades,” conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz said on Saturday. Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), referred to a chaotic political stalemate in the central German state of Thuringia, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) made breakthrough gains in a September 1 election and took more than a third of seats in the state parliament. In Thuringia, the CDU is now struggling to put together a governing majority in the deeply divided p…