Dresden

Walking through Dresden this weekend, I was bombarded with political messaging. Posters on every lamppost promise anything from “top education” to “law and order” — whatever it takes to draw voters back from the political fringes ahead of regional elections.

The three German states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia will elect new parliaments in September, and in all three polling suggests that up to half of voters might opt either for the Right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) or the Left-wing populists of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW).

Since all three elections are held in the former East Germany, commentators have been quick to suggest that populism may be in the political DNA of those who once lived under socialism. Really, though, what’s happening in the East is happening all over Germany and Europe. Centrists close their eyes to this at their peril.

The biggest concern for Germany’s political establishment is the AfD, which may win all three states with anything between a quarter and a third of the vote. While other issues play a role, immigration is key. Here in Saxony, where the domestic intelligence service classified the local AfD chapter as “Right-wing extremist”, the party’s election posters advocate “remigration” and border controls to neighbouring EU countries.

While immigration has long been seen as a particular issue in the East, a major survey showed that West Germans have similar concerns — be that regarding the increased costs for the welfare state (an issue to 77% in the West and 82% in the East) or conflicts between immigrants and local communities (a worry to 71% of West Germans and 82% of East Germans).

The AfD also came second in Hesse and third in Bavaria last year — both in the former West. In Bavaria, the Free Voters came second with a Right-wing agenda and the centre-right Christian Social Union won. Together they gained over two-thirds of votes for parties that want to reduce immigration.

Look beyond Germany’s borders and the idea that a shift towards the Right requires recent experience of dictatorship looks increasingly absurd. After all, the results of the European elections were widely described as a “Right turn”, as parties of the populist Right won in France, Italy and Austria.

The appeal of the Left-wing BSW under its eponymous leader Sahra Wagenknecht is a different matter. While Left-wing populism is also a political force in other countries such as France, Italy, Greece and Spain, the residual demand for a party to the Left of the Social Democrats (SPD) in eastern Germany since reunification in 1990 is a specific phenomenon.

Wagenknecht herself was born in East Germany, where she joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party in the summer of 1989. She has since been a prominent figure in its successor parties until she left to form her own, the BSW, earlier this year. It instantly gained 6.2% of the vote in the European elections but, unlike the AfD, it can’t claim to be a major player in the former West Germany.

In the East, however, Wagenknecht’s mix of personal charisma, sympathy for Russia, anti-immigration rhetoric and Left-wing social policies attracts many voters. Her BSW is polling between 15 and 19% in each of the three state elections. This is in part due to Wagenknecht’s critical views on the war in Ukraine which resonate with many easterners, especially as the Berlin government ceases to provide fresh funds for Kyiv. Recent surveys have shown that a slim majority of West Germans think Russia’s aggression in Ukraine should be met with military strength, while only a third of East Germans agreed — a much bigger divergence than on immigration.

Of course, there are historical reasons why East Germans continue to think and vote differently than their West German compatriots on issues such as Ukraine. But their general direction of travel away from the centre isn’t unique.

Dissatisfaction with the status quo, particularly on immigration, has driven more and more voters to the political fringes, not just in the East. If centrists want to reclaim the ground they have lost, they should look at eastern Germany as a case study, not an outlier.

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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. Her latest book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe will be released in May 2026.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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