You can't buck the zeitgeist. Right now in Northern Ireland, the spirit of the times is moving with Sinn Féin and the DUP, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
The Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP seem incapable of working up a strategy that would prevent Northern Ireland transmuting into a two-party state - or statelet, as Gerry Adams might say.
If yesterday's pattern continues - and who would put a ceiling on the Sinn Féin or DUP vote - then the SDLP and Ulster Unionists face potential wipeout in the next Westminster election, which could happen as early as next May.
John Hume wandered around the count centre in the King's Hall in Belfast yesterday. He was the picture of a perplexed man who could not figure how nationalists had so deserted the SDLP, the party that chiefly gave us peace and the Belfast Agreement.
He reasoned that Sinn Féin's embracing of the peace process was republican acknowledgement that the IRA's "war" was wrong and the SDLP's "constitutional" politics was right. Therefore, he had rationalised, the voters would understand the logic of this view and support his heir apparent in Europe, Martin Morgan.
Mr Hume was out of touch by over 100,000 votes. In the European election five years ago, Mr Hume won over 191,000 votes. Yesterday Mr Morgan could only take 87,559. Try putting a brave face on that. The young former lord mayor of Belfast did just that by ignoring the last Euro figures and arguing instead that the party vote was only one percentage point down on last November's Assembly election, when it took 17 per cent.
It didn't wash. The figures and the upward and downward lines on the political graph respectively illustrating the contrasting fortunes of Sinn Féin and the SDLP put paid to such false consolation.
The victorious DUP man, Jim Allister, said the SDLP had nobody to blame but itself for Mr Hume "sanitising Sinn Féin/IRA".
The SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, allowed that indeed there was potential for some "ironic reflection" on how the SDLP, through the Hume-Adams initiative of the early 1990s, had brought the republican movement into the political system proper.
"We made our choices. We think we made the right choices. The electorate are making choices now but unfortunately we think they are making the wrong choices," he added, offering a mild version of that famous response from a defeated American political candidate, "The people have spoken - the bastards."
No, he said, he wasn't resigning. And no, he would not enter into a voluntary coalition with the DUP and UUP to form an executive that would sideline Sinn Féin, because "voluntary coalition is a euphemism for exclusion".
So what would he do to try to restore the SDLP's depleted fortunes? Reform, re-organise, shape up the party machine to try to match Sinn Féin's. A special conference will be held later this year to deal with party re-structuring. It will take more than a conference to resist the current zeitgeist, though.
On first reading of yesterday's result, you could be forgiven for surmising that Northern Ireland is now a more sectarian, polarised society. There is an element of truth to such analysis but the situation is not necessarily so bleak, because the DUP and Sinn Féin are gradually moving onto the middle ground that the SDLP and UUP previously controlled.
The re-elected UUP candidate, Jim Nicholson, touched on that point by observing how little security there was at the King's Hall yesterday despite the shoulder-to-shoulder physical proximity of Sinn Féin and DUP supporters.
At least Mr David Trimble could say his candidate, Mr Nicholson, was returned - but compared to the European election in 1999, his vote was down by 19,000. Mr Allister's vote was almost double Mr Nicholson's. In fact it was Mr Allister's surplus and Independent candidate John Gilliland's transfers that ensured his return to Brussels.
Mr Gilliland, Mr Eamon McCann of the Socialist Environmental Alliance and Ms Lindsay Whitcroft of the Greens won over 50,000 votes between them. Mr Gilliland, a former Ulster Farmers' Union leader, took the lion's share with 36,000 first preferences. It may happen some day, but this certainly wasn't the election where tribal politics took a beating.
And again there is talk of Ulster Unionist cabals having the knives out for Mr Trimble. But to what purpose? Changing leaders will hardly change party fortunes. The momentum is with the DUP, just as it is with Sinn Féin.
Yesterday, you could almost picture the DUP and Sinn Féin salivating at the thought of next year's local elections and expected Westminster election. At the moment, Sinn Féin has four Westminister seats and the DUP six while the SDLP holds three and the UUP five. Now Sinn Féin and the DUP respectively are seriously targeting all the SDLP and UUP seats. That might seem very ambitious but it is possible that they could take 16 of the 18 Westminster seats, creating the two-party system that Mr Durkan and Mr Trimble so fear.
The question after all this politicking is: can two parties so diametrically opposed to each other ever do business? Mr Adams was in no doubt that it was possible while Mr Allister, albeit in a hardline acceptance speech, did not close any doors. If the IRA goes away, his party will share power with Sinn Féin, was his message.
Up at Stormont today, the tedious work of achieving a political breakthrough resumes. It won't happen before the summer and there is no guarantee it will happen in the autumn. You can't help but wonder, though - now the DUP and Sinn Féin have conquered all before them, why they won't take us out of our misery and do a deal.