THE LATE summer sun is beating down on a merry crowd assembled in Neustadt an der Orla, a small town in the east German state of Thuringia. As children slurp ice cream and Thuringian Bratwürste warm on the grill, Björn Höcke (pictured), a practised provocateur who leads the state branch of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (afd), launches a diatribe against immigrants, journalists and the politicians who exploited the covid “plandemic” to test the limits of Germans’ support for freedom. He urges his audience to give the “cartel parties” the boot on September 1st, when Germany’s most fraught state elections in years will take place in Thuringia and neighbouring Saxony.