There’s a bull market in political polarization. In turn, the political center — “the establishment,” if you like — remains mired in a long-running, seemingly intractable bear market.

Domestically, the multi-dimensional challenge to centrist politics in Western democracies emanates from what one might describe as chaos entrepreneurs, who sow discord only to harvest the resultant rage capital. It’s a kind of socio-political insider trading.

Other than perhaps Donald Trump’s around-the-clock effort to torpedo his own reelection campaign, there’s scant evidence to suggest the establishment bear market’s near an end. On any given day, the headlines testify to the center’s enduring crisis.

Take Monday, for example. If you got past blanket coverage of mass protests in Israel, you discovered a hodgepodge of headlines documenting the first state ballot box victory for a far-right party in Germany since… well, since you know.

I’m talking, of course, about Alternative for Germany which, to be clear, isn’t the “alternative” anyone actually wants. Voters just think they want it because they’re disaffected.

Without delving too far into the specifics of domestic German politics, suffice to say AfD captured a third of the vote in Thuringia and nearly that much in Saxony, where the party came in a very close second to the CDU. Do note: AfD’s classified as an extremist organization in both locales.

If you ask me, there’s something incongruous about regional intelligence services designating a political party’s local chapters as “confirmed extremist” and then permitting that party to run candidates. At the federal level, AfD — which has 77 parliamentarians — is classified as “suspected extremist.” Its youth arm “enjoys” the same “confirmed” status as some of the party’s local branches.

The bar to ban parties in Germany is extraordinarily high. The government failed several times to ban Die Heimat, for example, but did succeed in convincing The Federal Constitutional Court to deny the party funding this year. AfD was founded in euroskepticism. It leans heavily on the exploitation of Germans’ immigration concerns and security fears to marshal electoral support. It’s unapologetically nationalist and inherently xenophobic, but to brand it a latter-day successor party to the Nazis has always been a bit of a stretch, particularly when other parties have competed hard for that most dubious of all titles.

So, Germany’s stuck with a rolling, far-right political insurgency which is now entering its second decade. “Voters made a clear decision,” co-chief Alice Weidel said, after the state votes on Sunday. “They want the AfD to participate in government.” And “participate” the AfD will. But govern they won’t. German politics, like French politics, includes a tacit, inter-party agreement to prevent the far-right from ascending power, for obvious historical reasons.

“All democratic parties are now called upon to form stable governments without right-wing extremists,” Olaf Scholz said. Germany “cannot and must not get used” to far-right parties winning elections, he went on. “The AfD is damaging Germany, weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.” (Incidentally, I’m in the camp who worries Germany could exist for another 10,000 years as a stable, thriving, inclusive democracy and still not entirely restore its “reputation,” but then again, America was founded in forced labor and genocide, so I guess I’m tossing stones from a glass house.)

It wasn’t just the far-right which had a big weekend in Germany. The far-left scored big gains too. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance — BSW, for short — ran up 16% of the vote in Thuringia and more than 10% in Saxony. The party’s namesake is a bit of an enigma, or as much of one as you can be when you’re a known quantity. Half-Iranian (hence the Farsi spelling of “Sarah”), the Thuringia-raised Wagenknecht is a leftist. And a conservative. And a Communist, with a capital “C.” And probably a lot of other things besides. On the record, she won’t cop to being anything unequivocally. That’s strategic. Wagenknecht wants free rein to be whatever she has to be to galvanize the same voter disaffection that AfD relies on. Think of it this way: If you’re German and you want to vote AfD but you don’t so much want the stigma, you can vote BSW. A lot of Germans are doing just that.

When Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Bundestag in June, all of BSW’s lawmakers joined most of AfD’s in boycotting the speech. Wagenknecht’s party accused Zelensky of “contributing to a highly dangerous spiral of escalation” and countenancing “the risk of a nuclear conflict.” That month’s European parliament vote — the same bloc-wide election that set in motion a political crisis in France — saw BSW scoring more than 6%, not bad for a party that didn’t even exist last year. AfD, you’ll recall, stormed to a second-place finish in the EU vote with a 16% share. Both parties outperformed in the east, consistent with Sunday’s results.

If this — big wins for the political extremes in Germany — sounds socially perilous to you, that’s because on some vectors it is. But as is the case in the US, the UK and France, there are genuine grievances behind the so-called “protest” vote. The problem comes in when the political establishment fails to address those grievances in such a way as to stem the tide — or stanch the ballot box bleeding.

As one academic who spoke to the Washington Post on Monday put it, a “protest” is when you vote for the political extremes once. By now, “there are a lot of people who have voted for [AfD] the second or even the third time.” Similarly, tens of millions of Americans will vote for Trump a third time in November. In France, for Marine Le Pen a fourth time in 2027. And so on.

At some point, the establishment has to deliver. Or risk seeing the political center squeezed out of existence from both sides. Recall that although France’s firewall against the far-right held, it was only because the far-left united opportunistically. As I put it two months ago, Macron’s snap election gambit paid off in that the cordon sanitaire held, but in denying the far-right, Macron ended up beholden to the far-left, which is now engaged in an effort to impeach him.

Where does it all end? I don’t know, frankly. The answer seems obvious enough: The center needs to deliver for voters in order to restore faith in the establishment. The problem is that real solutions require serious people, hard work, compromise and time. Populists on both the left and right are infallibly unserious people who traffic in quick fixes and inflammatory language designed not to solve problems, but to exacerbate the very societal fissures which enhance their own appeal with the disaffected voters about whose plight they generally care nothing for.

It’s a self-referential doom loop: The system’s broken and, according to the political extremes, the only people who can fix it are the chaos entrepreneurs whose political fortunes rely exclusively on it remaining broken.