AS THE POLLS closed in two keenly watched German state elections on September 1st, projections showed the hard right set to have notched up a first. With the details still to unfold as the full vote was counted, the story of the evening seemed clear: in Thuringia the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a hard-right party whose branches in both that state and Saxony, which also voted on September 1st, have been formally designated as extremist, appears to have topped the polls in a state election for the first time since its founding just over a decade ago. In Saxony it is projected to sit only fractionally behind the mainstream Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
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