BERLIN - Political opponents say he’s a Nazi and a court recently ruled he can be called a fascist, but to many Germans angry about immigration Bjoern Hoecke is the leader they’ve been waiting for. The 47-year-old former history teacher is predicted to lead the far-right Alternative for Germany party to third or even second place in a regional election Sunday, despite being considered a possible extremist threat by the country’s domestic intelligence agency. A poll released Friday by public broadcaster ZDF forecast that the party, known by its German acronym AfD, would receive 21% of the vote in Thuringia, almost doubling its 2014 result in the central state with a population of 2.1 million. The governing coalition of three left-wing parties is expected to lose its majority, according to the survey of 1,177 voters which had a margin of error of up to 3 percentage points. The vote in Thuringia, one of Germany’s 16 states, reflects the difficulty that mainstream parties have had confronting a politician who openly espouses racial ideology, has criticized Germany’s efforts to atone for the Holocaust and has questioned whether Adolf Hitler was “entirely evil” — positions that would have been considered beyond the pale by most German voters until recently. Like in other formerly communist eastern German states where AfD is particularly strong, the outcome of Sunday’s vote could force new, previously untested alliances between erstwhile political enemies united chiefly in their refusal to cooperate with the far right.