Forbidden fruit is becoming palatable to European voters

GERMAN is a language that its speakers know is never going to become the world's chief means of spoken communication.

- Patrick O'Flynn

And yet it has certain words which express simple concepts with more power than does any other language and hence find their way into English. One of those words is verboten, which roughly means "forbidden" or "not done".

Until Sunday, voting for the Right-wing ethnic nationalist party the AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) was one of those informally forbidden things.

But it isn't any more. Because the AfD has just finished runner-up in Germany's general election, doubling its previous vote share to more than 20%. It has become the official opposition party in the German parliament. Even in Germany, where war guilt ("Kollektivschuld") is still a powerful force, a party of the nationalist Right opposing mass immigration has caused an electoral earthquake.

Not only that, but the party that came top in the election, the traditionally centrist CDU, tacked to the Right precisely to ward off an even bigger stampede to the AfD.