Mr Höcke wants to “drain the swamp of the lefist biotype”
It's clear there's something different about Björn Höcke from the moment he arrives in Gotha. A ripple of expectation goes through the crowd as he strides across the cobbled town square, flanked by bodyguards dressed in black.
“There is nothing wrong with expressing our democratic opinion. We want Germany to remain German,” he tells his supporters, to ecstatic cheers.
Mr Höcke is the most controversial figure in German politics. He is under observation by the country’s intelligence services as a possible threat to the democratic order. His opponents say he is a Nazi, and German television has compared him to Hitler.
But to his supporters he is a hero. They have waited hours for him in the cold, windswept square of this small east German town, part of the ancestral home of the British Royal Family, and his bodyguards have to hold them back as they queue to take selfies with him.
Mr Höcke is only a regional politican, yet nobody in current German politics has built a personality cult to rival his.
If the polls are right, he is set to lead the nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to second place in regional elections in the eastern state of Thuringia on Sunday.
Almost of quarter of voters say they are prepared to back a man who has been compared to Hitler on national television.
An unusually dark atmosphere has hung over the campaign. Police are investigating death threats against several candidates, including Mike Mohring, the regional leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), who was told to quit the election or face stabbing or a car bomb in an email signed: “The musicians of the Reich State Orchestra”.
The campaign has taken place in the shadow of the failed far-Right terror attack on a synagogue earlier this month. Senior members of Mrs Merkel’s government have accused Mr Höcke of personally whipping up an atmosphere of anti-Semitism that led to the attack — charges he denies.
“It is the other parties who have fostered an atmosphere of stifling democratic opinion,” he tells his audience in Gotha.
A large crowd of protestors has gathered at the other end of the square — almost as many as have come to support Mr Höcke — and they try to drown him out with jeers. But he laughs them off. “And here we have the evidence of the education crisis in our country,” he says, to his supporters' delight.
He turns on the press too, lecturing the German television camera crews. “The press has an important role in a democracy," he says. "Unfortunately our German media does not perform it. They prefer to produce propaganda for the establishment.”
A lot of what Mr Höcke says is straight out of the Trump playbook — he even trots out the line “Drain the swamp”. But this is Trumpism with a twist: Mr Höcke says he wants to “drain the swamp of the lefist biotype”.
