When Sahra Wagenknecht left Die Linke (The Left), she wanted to destroy her former party. But in the end, it was Die Linke that showed her up.

Her new party, the eponymous Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), has narrowly failed to enter the German parliament, winning 4.97% of the vote in yesterday’s federal election. Because of the closeness of the result, Wagenknecht has proposed a recount.

The BSW fell short by 0.03% of the vote — or about 13,000 people out of 50 million. Because it failed, there are more seats for the other parties, meaning a grand coalition between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) is possible. The difference between an unstable three-party coalition and a firmer two-party coalition ruling Europe’s largest economy came down to fewer votes than some British MPs’ majorities. By contrast, Die Linke — thought until just weeks ago to be heading out of parliament — celebrated an 11th-hour surge, storming into the Bundestag with nearly 9% of the vote.

What went wrong for the BSW? By the time the snap election was called in November, the party had been racking up success after success. Just six months after its creation, it won 6% of the vote in the European elections last June. Three months later, it won representation in three state parliaments, entering government in two.

It seemed a given that Wagenknecht would enter the Bundestag. Her brand of self-styled “Left-wing conservatism”, combining scepticism about immigration with Russia-friendly foreign policy, may not have been mainstream but it resonated with enough voters to make her a serious force.

But the BSW was caught off guard by the snap election. The party lacked local infrastructure and was short on cash for the campaign. It was forced to hurriedly register regional branches in order to participate in the national election.

If the party lacked its more established opponents’ ground game, it also became increasingly irrelevant as the campaign wore on. A series of terror attacks committed by refugees and asylum seekers focused the debate on migration. Recriminations over CDU leader Friedrich Merz’s decision to weaken the “firewall” by seeking Alternative for Germany (AfD) votes for a resolution on immigration only confirmed the far-Right’s centrality to the new political reality.

In that context, Wagenknecht’s offer of slightly more respectable anti-migrant populism than the AfD fell flat. Her unapologetically Russia-friendly foreign policy was also overtaken by events, with US President Donald Trump quickly initiating an anti-European turn in America’s foreign policy.  When the most powerful man in the world is threatening to impose so-called “peace” in Ukraine on the Kremlin’s terms, why bother voting for a minor German party running on a platform of pro-Russian foreign policy?

Wagenknecht may also have overestimated her own personal appeal. Personality-driven parties have a poor record in German politics, and it doesn’t get much more personal than naming the party after yourself. The BSW leader was relatively absent from the campaign train — a critical weakness for a party so closely associated with her.

Ironically, Wagenknecht leaving Die Linke may also have made her former party more electable. By ridding Die Linke of many of its most reflexively pro-Russian members, the party became more appealing to young people, whose support was key to its success.

Die Linke’s surge was largely thanks to a speech made earlier this year by leader Heidi Reichinnek, which sharply criticised Merz for seeking AfD votes for a resolution on immigration, a first for postwar Germany. “I want to tell people: don’t give up, stand up and resist fascism,” Reichinnek said in the speech, which garnered tens of millions of views on social media. It may not have had the same effect if the party were still stuffed with its most vocal Russian apologists.

What next for Wagenknecht? During the campaign, she pledged to retire from politics if her party didn’t enter the Bundestag. But other parties also failed to enter parliament on the first try — including the AfD, now the second-strongest force in German politics.

The BSW has a solid base in state parliaments and in Brussels. Having failed to enter the Bundestag by a rounding error, it will be reflecting on how to capitalise on its still-significant influence. Wagenknecht is certainly putting a brave face on it. At her election party at a communist-era cinema last night, the East German-born politician pledged: “This is not the end.” If she wants any inspiration for a political comeback, she need only look at her former party.

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Ido Vock is a reporter and editor based in Berlin, specialising in Europe’s politics and economy. He was previously a senior journalist at the BBC and Europe correspondent at the New Statesman.

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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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