The unfortunate but not unexpected breakthrough  of far-right extremists in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday has rattled the Berlin's political establishment. Voters gave six seats in the state legislature to the German National Democratic party (NPD) -- just over seven percent statewide. But in its "brownest" towns a full quarter to a third of voters supported the neo-Nazis. Oskar Niedermayer, political scientist at Berlin's Free University, told the Financial Times it was a bad sign for Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Her popular image has collapsed in recent weeks," he said, "and that's why, for instance, she failed to provide a 'chancellor's bonus' to the CDU (her conservative Christian Democrats) in Mecklenburg, her home state."

Commentators, though, see a loss of face and power for both of Germany's major parties. This kind of thing is typical during "grand coalition" years in Germany, when the big two (the CDU and the Social Democrats) of the right and left rule together, as they do now under Merkel. Political compromise always sends voters to the fringes. But German papers on Tuesday aren't in a forgiving mood, and they're laying blame for the brown tide in Mecklenburg on the fecklessness of Germany's established politicians.

The CDU and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) are clinging to power "by their fingernails," writes the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung. While the NPD got seats in Mecklenburg, voters in Berlin -- the other German region to vote on Sunday -- have fled in search of single issue parties. An elderly-rights party, a women's party, and an animal-rights party made gains in Berlin just like the far right did, the paper points out: "This single-issue voting should be a warning for the larger parties. The voters are filleting their interests."

The city's popular gay Mayor Klaus Wowereit won re-election by an embarrassingly thin margin, the paper goes on to argue, and now his party, the SPD, is wondering if he could become Germany's first gay chancellor -- in spite of 20 percent unemployment in Berlin and €60 billion in debt linked to his name which by all rights "should keep him far from an office that oversees more people and more money." If the two parties keep up this "ignorant" thinking, the paper writes, "they'll learn the lesson of (Mecklenburg) and Berlin" even more clearly at the next election in 2008. "The nation always has alternatives."

"The poor election results," writes the Financial Times Deutschland, "nevertheless dash hopes of dissolving the unloved grand coalition. Dissolution would be pure political suicide for the CDU, judging from the party's showing, so there remains a depressing sense of chafing under the coalition while still falling short of the voters."

The left-wing Berliner Zeitung also sees the elections as a failure for bigger parties "that ride on principle." Only the Greens and the SPD, who are flexible enough to negotiate, did at all well in Berlin, the paper argues. Other parties lost ground: "The Free Democrats with their firm free-market ideologies: election goals missed. The CDU with their 'values' debates and emphasis on security: election goals missed. The Left Party with its … contrite rhetoric of social conscience: election goals catastrophically missed."

But it was the leftist daily Die Tageszeitung that studied what neo-Nazis did right in this election while the major parties stood by. The extreme German right isn't just anti-immigrant; it's also pro-family and part of the fabric of daily life in towns which larger parties have abandoned. The NPD, argues the paper, "has put down roots in places where there is no alternative. It's anchored in families and accepted socially. Neo-Nazis in many places are just 'our boys'," and voting for the party "isn't a breach of any taboo, because there is no taboo against it." The paper suggests that large parties don't even try to get out the vote in these regions because they're afraid to admit they've lost touch. "As long as the SPD, CDU, and (the Left Party) deny this state of affairs, they'll never start the laborious work it will take to gain a foothold in these forgotten districts." Sunday may indeed have been a "devastating day," as one politician in Mecklenburg put it, writes the paper: "But the NPD thinks in years."