It’s tempting to think of the German snap election on Sunday as a done deal. The conservative CDU/CSU is firmly in the lead. They won’t form a coalition with the anti-immigration AfD, so will likely end up working with the center-left SPD or the Greens, possibly both.

But much is up in the air. Many voters are undecided, and small parties have the power to decisively alter the complex parliamentary arithmetic. In the end, the political future of Europe’s largest economy may be decided by a few thousand votes.

For the first time in decades, many Germans yearn to break the status quo. A recent YouGov poll found that over three-quarters of voters want “big” or even “very big” change in economic and immigration policy. Tellingly, only 43% expect such change to come about. It’s this pessimism that makes their behavior in the polling booth hard to predict. It could lead to tactical voting on an unprecedented scale as voters think beyond political parties to get the kind of politics they want. I’ve seen Left-wing campaigners ask Green voters to vote for the SPD or vice versa in order to beat a conservative constituency candidate.

One young woman told me yesterday that instead of voting for the hard-Left party Die Linke, she’ll vote conservative this time. When I baulked at such a jump from one end of the spectrum to the other, she shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got to do what’s in the country’s interest rather than your own.” What she wants most of all, she explained, is stability and for that one party needs to get enough votes to steer the course. A further splintering, she reckoned, would create more chaos which would only suit the AfD. A recent poll suggested that she’s not alone: nearly 70% of Germans worry that they might not get a stable government.

Then there are the undecided — around a fifth of voters on the eve of the election, according to a survey. They are unlikely to stop the conservatives from winning. The CDU/CSU have hovered around the 30% mark for weeks but will influence coalition-building. The conservatives are upholding their “firewall” against the AfD, so they will have to look Left. Ideally, they’d like to work with the SPD to form a centrist bloc. However, the SPD has been polling around 15%, and it might be tight for the two centrist parties to get a majority together.

Even if only a few votes are missing, the conservatives may have to invite the Green Party into the centrist boat. The Greens have made the phasing out of the combustion engine a precondition for cooperation. They favor open borders and hate both nuclear power and fossil fuels. It’s hard to see how the drastic change in economic and immigration policy will come about when the conservatives allow both Left-wing parties that are currently in government to stay.

Lastly, a new wildcard has been making the rounds on social media. What if both of Germany’s Left-wing parties, Die Linke and the BSW, make it into parliament? Could they form a bloc with the SPD and the Greens that outnumbers the conservatives? If they come even close, such a scenario would give the SPD and the Greens huge leverage over the conservative party even though it is predicted to get more votes than the other two combined. In that case, might the CDU/CSU be tempted to rule with AfD support if not in a formal coalition?

The range of possibilities is wide open, not least because German parties need to get above 5% of the vote or win constituencies outright to get seats in parliament. Currently, three parties are hovering on that threshold. If they don’t get in, the seat share of the big parties increases, making it easier for them to form majorities. If they all get in, a splintered parliament will emerge.

This election will be a nail-biter. But Europe’s largest economy cannot afford to drift around rudderless in times of crisis.

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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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