Sparks: Europe wrestles with impact of historic regional gains for Germany's AfD

Fear of the voters is fear of a fog; watch the atoms and see only people whose bread is dear and whose towns are thinning, neither of which is a demon, both of which are curable.

The vote happened; not in your power. The alarm, the wringing of hands, the abandonment of your own principles to chase those voters - examine what you actually control before you trade it away.

A house divided against itself cannot stand, and the question before Europe is not whether the grievance is just, but whether accommodation can be made without surrendering the thing that cannot be surrendered.

Forget the speeches; the leverage sits with whoever owns the grievance, the constraint on the chancellor is arithmetic, and a party that answers votes with lectures will discover that fear of losing beats love of being governed well.

One regional result is a single observation; without the comparative series - turnout, income, migration flows, measured the same way across twenty years - the alarm bells and the dismissals are equally unsupported by the record.

We are told the surge was engineered by strategists; but twenty years of stagnant wages, one shuttered factory at a time, accumulated into this, and the arrangement that survived tells us it fit the conditions - nothing more.

Treat the electorate as an engine and the polls as its output register: the sequence of operations feeding it - wages, housing, immigration, dignity - can be traced exactly, which means the outcome, unlike the panic, is reprogrammable.

Brussels insists there is one correct political cosmology for twenty-seven worlds, and the refusal to countenance other centres is itself the diagnosis; the idea they condemn is not wrong, it is inconvenient, and condemned ideas travel.

The mainstream parties assure everyone the voters will come to their senses by autumn, and the assurances are delivered with the same warmth a river shows a town it has already decided to flood.

Panic will not get anyone anywhere; mark the route, count who is actually persuadable, secure the waystations before nightfall, and keep your hand steady, because one person's fright can scatter the whole party.

Things that are hateful: a party that diagnoses the voter instead of listening; a warning issued only after the warning could have helped; an editorial beginning 'this should surprise no one,' written by someone it surprised.