Brazen political opportunist and Ministerpräsident of Bavaria Markus Söder, who will do or say literally anything to further his career, has at least the virtue of knowing whither the wind blows. He spent most of the pandemic subjecting Bavarians to the harshest containment measures in all of Germany, and he cancelled Oktoberfest not only in 2020, but also in 2021 – the first time since World War II that Munich was denied its annual festival of drunken debauchery.

With the advent of Omicron, though, and as the 2023 Bavarian parliamentary elections loomed, Söder suddenly started talking about the importance of keeping everything in proportion. Thus did the man who once could not hike in the mountains without an FFP2 respirator bearing the lesser Bavarian arms …

… come to fill his Twitter timeline with nothing – literally nothing – but pictures of himself and his constituents unmasked drinking beer together:

Today, he told BILD that “Everyone needs to decide for himself, if and how he visits the Wiesn. I’m coming without a mask”; for good measure, he also said he was amazed at “the overwrought messaging from Mr. Lauterbach.”

It’s fun to laugh at these losers, but there’s an important point at the core of it: The new pandemic legislation proposed by Lauterbach and Buschmann allows the federal states to impose indoor mask mandates beginning on 1 October. But Oktoberfest ends two days later, which means that Bavaria will not immediately impose the new rules. It’s possible we simply never enact the restrictions; indeed, our federal health minister has already suggested that he doubts the utility of a general indoor mask mandate in the absence of any worrying statistics. Perhaps, for the first time, some of the states will simply refuse the restrictions that the government has offered them. Even if only one or two defect, that might be enough discredit the whole mythology of distancing and masking.