The latest state elections in Germany have confirmed a trend that is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. The issue is no longer the occasional success of one party or failure of another, but the gradual dismantling of a political system that for decades appeared almost permanent.
The postwar German model rested on competition between two “people’s parties,” the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats and this conservative-social democratic axis provided stability after the upheavals of the first half of the 20th century, allowing governments to alternate while remaining within broadly accepted political boundaries.
Germany adhered to this model particularly closely, so the political landscape expanded significantly only twice, first with the rise of the Greens in the 1980s, which brought the rebellious generation of 1968 into the establishment, and then after reunification with the emergence of the Left from the former East German political tradition, but that orderly system is now breaking down.
The results in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, following Saxony-Anhalt two weeks earlier, leap off the page, as the AfD won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, while the CDU fell below the 5% threshold for the first time in a German state election. In Berlin, meanwhile, the Left finished first, with the CDU second and the SPD falling to fifth place.
For the leaderships of the CDU and SPD, it’s tempting to reduce the problem to the rise of the AfD and concentrate on how it should be contained, but the deeper problem is the fragmentation of the entire electoral landscape and the disappearance of the political manageability that Germany once took for granted.
Whether the AfD itself is capable of governing effectively remains another question, given the party has never governed a German state, while the established parties continue to reject coalitions with it.
Germany is therefore moving towards something resembling the politics of smaller European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, or Austria, with fragmented parliaments and increasingly complicated multiparty coalitions.
There’s nothing inherently unworkable about such a system and plenty of European countries function this way, but Germany is different. Its political culture has traditionally valued predictability and institutional continuity, but if fragmentation now spreads inside the CDU and SPD themselves, the consequences will extend beyond election arithmetic.
Germany isn’t particularly comfortable with political upheaval and when Germany becomes politically nervous, its neighbors have historically had reason to pay attention.
Research institutes and universities across Russia are keeping blacklists of their own staff. T-invariant has identified two patterns of pressure on scientists and faculty: they are summoned for “conversations” with FSB officers, or they are left without work when an expiring contract is quietly not renewed.
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Special Academic Operation. How the FSB has pursued the scientists who signed a letter against the war with Ukraine for two years running
The FSB has resumed its pursuit of the scientists who signed an anti-war letter in 2022. Also in the line of fire are staff at universities and research institutes whose names turned up in a data leak of users of Smart Voting [an opposition tactical-voting project run by Alexei Navalny’s team — T-invariant]. According to T-invariant’s reporting, this kind of pressure is most widespread at St. Petersburg State University (SPbU), where the deputy vice-rector for security is Oleg Shaidulin, former head of the political department of the city’s enter “E” [the police anti-extremism directorate — T-invariant].
Several former SPbU employees, all with many years at the university behind them, contacted the editors of T-invariant. Their immediate supervisors, they say, explained the refusal to renew their contracts by pointing to a blacklist. Talk of such a list at the university has been circulating for a long time, and media outlets have already written about it, T-invariant among them.
A faculty member in one of the social science departments, whose three-year contract ran out in 2026, told T-invariant that he had learned back in 2025 that he would be losing his job: “I don’t know what the main reason was. Maybe the letter, maybe other things I’ve done. Most likely it all just added up.”
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There is also a way off the blacklist at SPbU. “Kropachev’s [the university’s rector] terms are pretty lax. You don’t have to go to the Donbas. You can either donate to the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation [a state fund supporting veterans of the war in Ukraine — T-invariant] or sign on as a lecturer for the Znanie Society [a Soviet-era public-education society revived as a state outreach platform — T-invariant]. Then they forgive you both your Smart Voting registration and your signature on the letter. Though you do have to remove your signature. Unless, of course, there’s something more serious on you, like donations to the ACF [Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, designated ‘extremist’ in Russia — T-invariant] — that one sends you straight to a penal colony,” says a scientist who turned down the exit route his superiors offered him and ended up out of work. “For now I’m not even trying to find a university job, it’s hopeless. I’ve decided to pause, take stock and wait it out.”
A T-invariant source describes similar refusals to renew contracts at HSE University’s St. Petersburg campus and at the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). In one case, a young researcher from one of SPbU’s IT faculties held concurrent appointments at two St. Petersburg universities and lost both: neither contract was renewed.
“My supervisor asked around on my behalf, and he was told the reason was that I’d been added to some internal list of ‘politically unreliable’ employees. It’s an in-house system that people at the university unofficially call the ‘traffic light’: staff are sorted into yellow and red lists. I’m on one of them because I registered on the Smart Voting site in July 2021,” she told T-invariant.
She is not certain there was only one reason: she also signed the scientists’ letter against the war and publicly supported other human rights and activist projects. Even so, she has never been detained and has never faced administrative charges.
Where Were You for Four Years?
The open letter of Russian scientists and science journalists against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine became the largest public statement ever made by a single professional group: more than 8,500 Russian-speaking scientists around the world publicly condemned Russia’s military aggression. It was only a matter of time before the FSB took an interest. In the winter of 2024, T-invariant described how officers summoned large numbers of signatories for interviews and also worked through the administrations of universities and research institutes. Many scientists were threatened with criminal prosecution; in some cases, charges were actually brought. The vast majority did not withdraw their signatures despite the pressure and the threats. In 2026, the security services resumed their pursuit of signatories across Russia’s regions.
A researcher at a university in the Urals says that because of his signature on the anti-war letter he was called in for a talk with the FSB officer assigned to his university [Russian universities and research institutes have security-service officers assigned to them — T-invariant]: “They asked how I felt about the war in 2022 and how I feel about it now. I gave a vague answer.” In the four years since he signed, he says, the letter had caused him no trouble at all. Removing the signature now, in his view, would be pointless. “The officer handed me a printout from the Wayback Machine dated spring 2022. They had seven people from different universities in my city under investigation — I saw the list of names and affiliations lying on his desk,” the scientist said.
A researcher at a Siberian institute tells a similar story.
“My boss called and said the FSB officer assigned to us wanted to see me, and that a request had come down from Moscow. The man showed up at our institute and started asking: where did I get the link to the letter, who sent it to me, had I forwarded it to anyone else, had I talked about it with anyone, which social networks had I posted it on. That same day they summoned another colleague of mine from the institute — which is how I found out I wasn’t the only one who’d signed. We had a good long talk,” she said.
All of T-invariant’s sources at regional universities said that for more than four years their signatures on the letter had brought no consequences at all — which is why the new wave of FSB interest caught them by surprise.
‘Love Conquers All’
Sometimes the pressure on academics becomes public. In September 2026, it emerged that Tatiana Kudryavtseva, an instructor at Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, had resigned after 30 years there over complaints about her old Instagram posts. The story was reported by Kommersant.
According to Kudryavtseva, she was called in after class by the director of her institute and by the vice-rector for student affairs [a post responsible for students’ moral and ideological upbringing — T-invariant]. She was shown two screenshots from Instagram (owned by Meta, which Russia has designated an extremist organization and banned). “One, a photograph from 2020, showed an image (graffiti) in a St. Petersburg courtyard of a well-known and now deceased politician who has been designated an extremist, a terrorist and so on (years after that photo was taken),” the instructor said (quoted from Kommersant) [the reference is to Alexei Navalny — T-invariant]. The second, dated January 2021, showed Kudryavtseva holding a flashlight in a courtyard on Dumskaya Street, beside an inscription in Latin, Omnia vincit amor (“Love conquers all”) [in early 2021, Navalny’s supporters staged courtyard protests by shining phone flashlights — T-invariant].
The instructor says she was told the posts could be treated as displaying banned symbols, and was warned about a disciplinary committee and possible administrative and criminal liability. Kudryavtseva then handed in her resignation.
“I’m going to miss all of it. And it really stings that someone’s bigotry, someone else’s eagerness to curry favor, and someone else’s unwillingness to lift a finger and look into the situation ended with me being all but thrown out of the university I call home,” Kudryavtseva wrote.
The existence of staff blacklists at pedagogical universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg was described to T-invariant by an employee of one of them. His contract was not renewed, he said, because he “did not pass the security department’s check.” Management made it clear, he added, that with his signature on the anti-war letter he would no longer be able to find a job at any major state university.
The post The Academic Traffic Light. How Russian universities flag “politically unreliable” academics appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36, dated August 31, 2026. Azat Miftakhov has published a paper in the French quarterly La Revue de la filière mathématiques (June–August 2026). The paper was written at the suggestion of French mathematician Bernard Randé, a member of the journal’s editorial board and of the international association Solidarité FreeAzat. Miftakhov completed the work while held in prison in Dimitrovgrad.
Azat Miftakhov’s paper is titled “La conjecture de Chui dans un cadre hilbertien” (“Chui’s Conjecture in a Hilbert Space Setting”). Unfortunately, we have not been able to read it. The paper was not posted on arXiv.org, and the journal itself is available only by subscription. However, The Insider published the first page of Miftakhov’s manuscript, which gives a sense of both the subject of the paper and his approach to the problem.
The problem Miftakhov tackled concerns a variant of Chui’s conjecture. The conjecture came about in 1971, more or less by accident. In a short note, the well-known American mathematician Charles Chui asked how to place N unit point charges on the unit circle so that the average strength of the field they generate inside the disk is as small as possible. More precisely, he asked whether this quantity is bounded below by an absolute constant — one that holds for any number of charges in any arrangement. The answer came a year later: in 1972, Donald Newman published an elegant solution — yes, such a constant exists, and π/18 will do.
The conjecture itself is a remark Chui dropped in that same note. It is plausible, he wrote, that the minimum is attained by the most natural arrangement: the charges placed at the vertices of a regular N-gon. Chui offered no proof and moved on to entirely different things. The conjecture remains unproven to this day.
Even the case of two charges turned out to be hard. The proof was found in 2023 by Fedor Nazarov, a professor at Kent State University in Ohio. He posted his answer on MathOverflow, a forum where mathematicians put questions to one another, and where Nazarov has been answering his colleagues’ questions for many years under the username fedja.
Mathematicians have tried reformulating Chui’s conjecture for Hilbert spaces (that is, spaces equipped with an inner product). In this setting, there has been significant progress. In 2020, Evgeny Abakumov (Gustave Eiffel University, Marne-la-Vallée), Alexander Borichev (Aix-Marseille University), and Konstantin Fedorovskiy (Bauman Moscow State Technical University and St. Petersburg State University) posted an important paper, “Chui’s conjecture in Bergman spaces.” They proved Chui’s conjecture in weighted Bergman spaces for a broad class of weights: the minimum is attained if and only if the charges are evenly spaced. But some cases remained open, and the authors listed them explicitly at the end of the paper.
It was precisely this set of problems that Randé proposed to Miftakhov. The first page of his manuscript opens with the words “Let us assume” and contains the statement of the theorem and the beginning of the proof. He looks at the case where the charges lie strictly inside the disk rather than on the circle itself. And what he proves is not an inequality but an exact equality: the energy of any configuration equals the energy of the regular-polygon configuration plus an explicit nonnegative term that vanishes only when the charges form a regular polygon. If Miftakhov has indeed proved this, then Chui’s claim (for Bergman spaces) follows as a corollary. The original Chui conjecture, however, remains open.
On March 5, 2026, three mathematicians from the St. Petersburg Department of the Steklov Mathematical Institute — Evgueni Doubtsov, Anton Tselishchev, and Ioann Vasilyev — posted the preprint “Weighted Chui’s conjecture.” Their work follows Newman’s line of attack: they generalize his bound to arbitrary positive charges and to spaces of any dimension. At the end of the paper, the authors pose several open questions, the first of which is what happens when the charges lie not on the circle but inside the disk.
On March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received Miftakhov’s manuscript, in which the charges likewise lie inside the disk. These are different problems, but the setup is the same — and so is the timing.
The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “In October 2025, Solidarité FreeAzat, together with the Navalny France team and the organization La Libre Pensée, held an evening in Paris devoted to writing letters in support of Russian political prisoners. Among the participants was Bernard Randé, a mathematician, a former teacher in the preparatory classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and a member of our association. Instead of an ordinary letter of support, he decided to give Azat what he misses most — a real mathematical problem.”
Getting mathematical formulas into facilities run by the FSIN [Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service — T-invariant] is a challenge in its own right: such letters often never reach their recipients. A long wait followed, and on March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received a reply from Azat via Solidarité FreeAzat. The letter opened with the words: “And so your problem, which brightened my days and cost me many hours of sleep, became a breath of fresh air for me. Thank you so much for that!” Attached to the letter were six handwritten pages containing the solution to the problem Randé had posed.
The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “Azat worked under exceptionally harsh conditions. Over four months in detention — with no scientific library, no internet access, no chance to discuss mathematics with colleagues, and only a few hours a day with pen and paper — he managed to solve a problem that was open at the time.” Here we have to take their word for it, since we have not yet seen Miftakhov’s paper. Still, the fact that the paper was published is a strong signal in itself.
Averil Aussedat, a member of Solidarité FreeAzat and a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at the University of Pisa, proposed that her university officially invite Azat to present his result. On July 23, 2026, Azat Miftakhov’s wife, Elena Gorban, received an official letter from the University of Pisa inviting Azat to speak at a research seminar to be held in April 2027. If Miftakhov is not allowed to present his work in Pisa in April 2027, one can only hope that on September 3, 2027, when his latest sentence ends, he will be released and able to engage with colleagues and work under normal conditions.
Chui’s problem has been around for 55 years. Today it is being worked on by Abakumov in Paris, Borichev in Marseille, Fedorovskiy in Moscow, Doubtsov and his colleagues in St. Petersburg, and Nazarov in Ohio. Now one more participant is joining the conversation — from a prison in Dimitrovgrad, from the Polar Owl penal colony [a special-regime prison above the Arctic Circle — T-invariant], in a letter written on FSIN letterhead. Not as an object of pity or a media story, but as a colleague — with a new theorem.
The post Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
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