Germany has, once again, been rattled by a terror attack. This Thursday the target was a protest rally that was organised by a trade union. The authorities revealed that a 24-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan had tailed the protest march with his car before speeding up and ramming into the crowd.

According to current reports at least 30 people were injured. Fortunately, there are no reports of deaths yet. The attacker had reportedly posted Islamist content on social media prior to the attack.

It is a perverse and horrible fact of life that in Germany at the moment, before the blood spilled in a terror attack has even dried, the conversation moves onto what it means for the polls. The country is electing a new Bundestag in 10 days and immigration has become one of the most important issues dominating the debate. Not the usual boring old topics of tax reform, the pension system, energy investment, or how to improve the nation’s notoriously dysfunctional rail system. No, what’s on top of everyone’s mind is how to stop the imported terror.

The tragic events in Munich came less than two months after Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old Saudi national, had rammed a car into a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, killing six and injuring 299. Earlier that summer, the 26-year-old Syrian national Issa al Hassan had committed a mass stabbing at a diversity festival in the western German city of Solingen, which resulted in three deaths and eight injuries. The Islamist terror organisation Islamic State took credit for the attack.

Public outrage and the demand for action is strong. According to a recent poll, 68% of Germans say that the country should accept fewer refugees. Some 57% believe that the government should reject migrants who arrive at the border without valid travel documents, while 75% of Germans reported in another poll that they do not believe the current government was doing enough to limit irregular migration.

There is a theoretical political majority to carry out this popular will in parliament: the two parties that are most critical of immigration, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), currently command a combined majority. Meanwhile, the two parties that form the acting government, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens, are supported by less than 30% of voters. Many feel that the two Left-of-centre parties lack a sense of urgency in the face of Islamist terror.

But the two governing parties’ wrath has been directed instead at CDU/CSU candidate for Chancellor Friedrich Merz after he led an effort in the Bundestag in late January to pass a bill that would have limited migration to Germany. Merz had previously said that he did not seek the AfD’s support for the bill in order to keep up his self-imposed “firewall” against any collaboration with the Right-wing opposition party. But in the end almost all AfD members voted for the bill while the SPD and Greens did not.

Instead, the latter two called for mass rallies against the Christian Democrats’ violation of the taboo to accept votes from the AfD. Hundreds of thousands of Germans heeded the call, and the CDU’s party headquarters in Hannover were briefly stormed and occupied by Leftist activists.

But as polls reveal, such militant protests by Left-wing activists are the vocal cry of a diminishing minority while far more Germans desperately long for an end to the terror and a return to what they feel are reasonable immigration controls. As terror attacks become more common, fewer Germans will insist that keeping up a firewall against the AfD is the most pressing task.

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Gregor Baszak is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in The American Conservative, The Bellows, Cicero, Platypus Review, Return, Sublation, and elsewhere.

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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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