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

My education prepared me for parties that commanded loyalties; nobody prepared a philosophy for parties that command nothing and win anyway, and the acceleration is the finding.

The mainstream calls the new movement an aberration, but trace its conditions - austerity, migration, neglect - and the aberration dissolves into the mainstream's own history, leaving neither fixed position standing.

The old parties treated consent as an inheritance rather than a manufacture, and in this interregnum the morbid symptom everyone alarms over is simply their hegemony arriving unaccompanied.

They rang the alarm bells, held a conference about the alarm bells, and then adjourned to dinner; the house is sealed, and the audience is the mechanism.

Forget the alarm; here is the leverage - a party with no national programme holds regional power, and the established parties must now choose between coalition with it or coalition against the voters.

Brussels speaks fluently of democratic values and then repeats the same losing strategy election after election; the symptom, not the communiqué, is the true message, and it says the excluded have found a party.

A body rejected by its head does not merely sicken; it grows its own green in neglected soil, and the physicians who diagnose the growth while ignoring the soil will harvest what they planted.

Passing through towns the capitals fly over, I note the shuttered shops, the young people gone, the ballot boxes full - details the alarmed commentators omitted because they observed from the train window.