How to deal with the hard-right threat in Germany

IT WOULD BE comforting to play down the significance of the votes in two German states on September 1st, when the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party lost in Saxony by a whisker and scored a nine-point lead over its nearest rival in Thuringia. Yes, this victory is the first the hard right has won in a state election in Germany since the second world war. And yes, its leader in Thuringia is a nasty piece of work with two criminal convictions for using a slogan popularised by the Nazi brownshirts and banned under German law. But Thuringia is home to less than 3% of Germans. It is about as representative as Wyoming in America, where Donald Trump took 68% of the votes in 2016, or Clacton in Britain, which elected Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, in July.