Sparks: Germany's far-right AfD bids for first taste of power in eastern vote
What the republic lost was never written in its constitution: the local associations and shared work that once bound citizens together, leaving a vacuum into which whoever promises belonging will walk unopposed.
Stripped of speeches about dignity and voice, the vote measures what equality was promised thirty years ago and never delivered, for resentment is interest wearing mourning clothes.
That a people, having been treated as surplus to their own country's prosperity, should conclude the compact no longer binds them, is a lesson every generation that neglects the governed must relearn at its peril.
Do not ask what the movement wants. Ask what neglect built it. Storms are not the sea's invention; they are the calm that did nothing.
They dismantled the local industries because the economists called them obsolete, and now they cannot explain why the towns those factories fenced in have voted to tear down everything else.
As water finds the lowest channel no matter how the engineer diverts it, discontent flows through whatever opening the ballot provides; seal one pipe and observe where the pressure appears next.
The establishment parties had spent decades agreeing on everything important, which left the voters the agreeable novelty of disagreeing with all of them at once.
Fight the movement and you feed it; the harder the fist closes around it, the further the resentment spreads - govern so the grievance has no water, and the fire starves alone.
Count the record: reunification promised in 1990, wages lagging for thirty years, factories closed, young people departing - then name the cause as economic abandonment, not the prejudice the press prefers to deplore.
We are told the movement's rise was engineered; but a thousand grievances competed for votes and only the variant best adapted to decades of neglect survived, which is adaptation, not design.
The wage packet got thinner every year while the capital city got richer, and a man who has watched his town's machinery go silent does not need a pamphlet to tell him who ignored him.
Reunification was pronounced a success by its makers and then abandoned to its own devices; the creature now turning toward the creator is asking the question the creator refused to answer - what am I owed?
In the western towns the shopkeepers speak of prosperity they have read about; here the innkeeper asks whether anyone in the capital remembers his road exists, and the difference between the two answers is the whole story.
'The region has not fully caught up since reunification.' Not fully, after thirty-six years - note the adverb doing the work the economist's conscience should have done.
How fortunate that after thirty years of promises, the best of all possible republics has discovered that the villages it forgot have remembered themselves, and chosen such an energetic way to say so.
They held a seminar on why the province turned. Nobody from the province attended. The diagnosis was thorough. The patient was not consulted.