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Germany’s Social Democrats were on course for a narrow victory in elections in the eastern state of Brandenburg, an unexpected reprieve for Olaf Scholz as he prepares to run for a second term as chancellor next year.

Projections by public broadcaster ARD put Scholz’s SPD on 31 per cent, slightly ahead of the far-right Alternative for Germany on 30 per cent.

They suggest the SPD can continue to govern Brandenburg, a state which the party has ruled since German reunification in 1990 and which has long been seen as one of its national strongholds.

That will relieve the pressure on the chancellor, whose approval ratings have slumped in recent months and who has been named by pollsters as the least popular chancellor since reunification. A survey published last week found only 3 per cent of voters support his coalition of SPD, Greens and liberals.

Many in the SPD had privately suggested Scholz should set aside his ambitions of running for a second term in next year’s Bundestag election and improve the party’s fortunes by making way for a more popular politician, such as defence minister Boris Pistorius.

But with the SPD projected to win in Brandenburg, such critical voices may be silenced, at least temporarily.

The preliminary results show that the huge gamble undertaken by Brandenburg’s prime minister, Dietmar Woidke, appears to have paid off.

Woidke had threatened to resign if the AfD came first in Sunday’s election. The threat galvanised moderate voters of all persuasion, who rallied round their prime minister and secured him a narrow victory.

An exit poll by ARD found 75 per cent of SPD voters and 59 per cent of voters for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union said they were “not convinced by the party, but I’m voting for it to prevent a strong AfD”.

“It seems to be the case that it was the Social Democrats, as so often in history, that stopped the extremists on their path to power,” Woidke told supporters on Sunday.

“Dietmar Woidke and the Brandenburg SPD have staged a furious catch-up race,” said Kevin Kühnert, the SPD’s national general secretary, noting that the party had been polling at below 20 per cent a few weeks ago but, according to exit polls, was now above 30 per cent.

Experts said one reason for Woidke’s success was his decision to eschew joint appearances with Scholz and to distance himself from the chancellor’s policies, in a clear attempt to prevent his local SPD being tainted by association with an unpopular Berlin coalition. 

However, the SPD’s apparent success in Brandenburg is unlikely to translate into better approval ratings nationwide. The party — together with its coalition partners, the Greens and liberal Free Democrats — has been blamed by voters for high inflation, surging energy costs and a stagnating economy.

The outcome in Brandenburg was also encouraging for the anti-immigrant AfD, large parts of which, in the view of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, threaten the country’s democratic system. 

Three weeks ago it won elections in the eastern state of Thuringia, making it the first far-right party to secure victory in a regional poll in Germany’s postwar history. It also came second in neighbouring Saxony, just behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union.

The party has profited from rising public concern about irregular immigration, especially in the wake of a terror attack in the western city of Solingen in August.

Woidke has headed a coalition of the SPD, CDU and Greens since 2019 and the ARD projections suggest the alliance can continue in power for a further term.

Sunday was also a good day for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a new left-wing populist party that was only formed in Brandenburg four months ago. ARD projections show the BSW, which like the AfD opposes military aid for Ukraine, won 12 per cent of the vote.

From concept to completion, the French architect Jean-Louis Deniot approaches every project in the style of a meticulous auteur — developing a new commission with a narrative and storyboard and executing every minor detail of a home, right down to the cutlery. “They might move in with just their toothbrush,” the 50-year-old says of his clients with a grin, one late summer morning in his Paris office on the Quai d’Orsay. 

Deniot’s HQ is one of the only office spaces in this mid-century apartment block — the French decorator Charles Sevigny once lived in the building, as did the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy — and he has taken care to preserve a certain residential feel. From the spacious living room where we sit, fitted with glass-panelled doors and a glossy painted ceiling to reflect the light and the water from the river Seine, the layout travels through his workspace, which resembles a dining room with book-lined walls, to a seemingly endless sequence of small rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows. 

In Hong Kong, he leans into rigorous lines and lacquered finishes. In New York, he works with steel and glass for reflection and transparency

It epitomises Deniot’s approach to orienteering design around natural light and how he creates balance and flow. For him, that flowing floor plan is like a sequence of vignettes. He eschews hallways in favour of the French enfilade layout to build a sense of rhythm and atmosphere. “The study of a layout is how you create energy in a space, and the more you progress throughout the home, the more detail you are fed,” he says, adding of the result: “It has to be captivating, optimistic, dreamy and contemplative.” 

Since launching his company in 2000, after graduating from the prestigious École Camondo, Deniot has built an architecture and interior design business spanning five continents. Today, pinned to the cork walls in one part of the office are 3D renderings of residential projects as far-reaching as Tangier, Palm Beach, Hong Kong, Taipei, Chandigarh, New York and Qatar. The latter, a palace-like 5,000 sq m villa, is an elegant new build steeped in such intricate artisanal craftsmanship — plasterwork, wood panelling, mosaics — that it looks like a historic site. As if it has always been there. 

Each of the projects on display bears Deniot’s signatures — sweeping volumes and dramatic symmetry, a richness in craft details and materials, and an overall soft and luminous palette. Influenced by his love for institutional and historic buildings (the Louvre is a recurring inspiration), his work combines the rigour and elegance of French neoclassicism and a flair for eclecticism in the tradition of Henri Samuel, whom he greatly admired. 

Yet, every different project also appears distinct to its locale. In Hong Kong, he leans into rigorous lines, ombré walls, and lacquered finishes; in Tangier, his interiors speak to the sea, sky and vegetation, and he employs local craft touches, such as wickerwork, terracotta and woven fabrics. In New York, he works with steel and glass for reflection and transparency, and focuses on scale and height, in reference to the skyline as well as the city’s majestic historic homes. “The work is site-specific and contextual,” he says of how a city’s character and cultural identity feed into his designs, comparing it to a recipe. “Around the world, we all cook with the same basic ingredients, in this case, materials, but it is the way of putting them all together that makes it unique.” 

He estimates around half of his projects are new builds, which allows him the freedom to create specific character profiles — a projection of sorts of the potential homeowner. There is nuance even within mere miles: between homes in Palm Beach and Miami, or between two recent London developments, a Mayfair apartment and a duplex penthouse for The Whiteley in Bayswater. “It’s quiet luxury and more suggestive, with beautiful materials and simple, clean lines,” he says of the latter, adding: “If I had to compare it to a fashion house, it would be Hermès. It’s quite masculine. Mayfair is more suited to something feminine. Chanel.”

It sounds light-hearted, but it’s big business. “Jean-Louis has a unique ability to do something really unique and arresting without making it look kitsch or over the top. His interiors are bold, and both of the moment and timeless,” says property developer Alex Michelin, co-founder of Valouran, who recruited Deniot for The Whiteley, along with US designer Kelly Behun, Linda Boronkay, Joyce Wang and others to design the 139 private apartments in all (valued from £1.5mn to penthouses upwards of £40mn). 

Timelessness is something Deniot aspires to, especially with historical sites such as Cambridge House, the Grade I-listed Georgian townhouse that will open in 2025 as an Auberge Resort luxury hotel. Fittingly, the architect went full anglophile, decorating the royal suites in the aesthetics of former monarchs, such as Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II, and King George, and blanketing the “joyful and decadent” common areas in what he calls “Wedgwood colours”. He was the first choice for developer Jamie Reuben, who says, “Jean-Louis’ understanding of listed buildings and passion for history enabled him to bring this incredible building to life and begin its new chapter as a landmark site in the capital.”

Such projects are so grand in scale that some take more than a decade to develop. In 2016, he began designing the 365 apartments (180 configurations) and more than 50,000 sq ft of shared space, including a new pool, for New York’s Waldorf Astoria Residences. He referenced the building’s Art Deco DNA but played with something more geometric and abstract — drawing from the modern lines of the constructivist movement. “It gives the impression of Art Deco without being too ornamental,” he says of the project, which will finally see the light of day later this year. “We don’t count the years — it’s a labour of love — but the design needs to be sustained with time, and when it does, it’s very satisfying,” he says.

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“There is currently great danger,” a man wrote two years ago, “that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

It may surprise you to learn that the man in question was Elon Musk, who wrote these words when he bought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter back in October 2022, stressing the need for humanity to have a “common digital town square” that was “warm and welcoming to all”, not a “free-for-all hellscape”.

And yet . . . and yet. 

Repelled by the direction that both the site now called X and its owner have taken, an exodus from the platform is under way. That exodus — oh go on then, Xodus — has been particularly apparent in Britain, having gathered steam since Musk starting posting things like “civil war is inevitable” during the riots that broke out over the summer. Many have left the platform entirely, while others merely lurk. “I have an answer to this, but discussion only on Bluesky these days am afraid [sic],” I saw someone reply on X recently. 

Either way, activity has fallen discernibly. Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots. The same thing is happening elsewhere, and not just in places where the platform has been banned, such as Brazil. Over the same 16-month period, X’s active users in the US have fallen by about a fifth.

As disillusioned X users become, yes, ex-X-users, they are finding their way on to alternative sites. With Mastodon having proved off-puttingly techy for many, that tends to either be Meta’s Threads app, or Bluesky, the platform that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey helped to start. But while the former is winning in terms of absolute numbers — about 1.4mn daily active users of Threads in the UK, compared with just over 100,000 for Bluesky — it is the latter that has grown the most rapidly over the past six weeks, and that is cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati.

That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber. I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky (including when tucking into Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps in actual N16).

An even more fundamental problem is that nobody on Bluesky seems to actually mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who happens to be an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied “oh yes, but it is an echo chamber, that’s what people like about it, it’s lovely”.

Many enthuse about how like “old Twitter” Bluesky is, which is telling in itself: in the old days of Twitter, progressives far outnumbered their conservative counterparts in terms of how much they posted about politics on the platform, but that share has fallen dramatically since Musk took it over. According to the British Election Study, in the run-up to both the 2015 and 2019 elections, about 30 per cent of the most progressive Britons posted about politics on the platform. This year, while the most conservative Britons remained no less likely to post than before, the share of progressives posting on X had halved to 15 per cent; presumably that has since fallen much further, given that this survey preceded the riots.

In many ways this is all fair enough. Many of us use video-first platforms like Instagram and TikTok as procrastination-cum-entertainment; why shouldn’t the text-based social media sites be a place for procrastination-cum-cosy-filter-bubbling? Why not have a place on the internet that you can go and have a nice, civilised chat with someone who shares your worldview without the risk of coming across a load of vile racist content?

It comes down, in the end, to whether or not you believe that the “digital town square” Musk talked about when he bought Twitter can really exist and, if it can, whether it is of any benefit to anyone.

I have previously argued that a “digital town square” is a contradiction in terms — the internet is never going to enable the kind of engagement and understanding that comes from coming up against a real person in all their raw and imperfect humanity.

But while it will always be much messier and more maddening than we might like, I believe such a place is preferable to a series of siloed echo chambers. The irony is that it is the man who warned of the “great danger” of a splintering-off who is most responsible for making that a reality.

jemima.kelly@ft.com