Right in front: AfD could win German state

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1:06The Economist. Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer. Today on the show, why people hate talent here and are the Chinese finally learning to cherish chocolate? First up though. This is Ulrich Seagmund. He's a tall, blonde, 35-year-old man with very nice hair, a persistent grin. He's been campaigning in the East German state of Saxony and Health, which is holding a crucial election on Sunday, September the 6th. I attended one of his

2:12recent rallies on a blisteringly hot day in a town called Zeppes in Saxony and Health. Tom Nuffel is our chief Germany correspondent. It was more like a celebrity meet-and-greet than a political rally. And the day before this event, Despegel, which is one of the most prominent German weekly news magazines, had put his face on the cover and called him the most dangerous man in Germany. He was absolutely delighted by this. He bought up copies that morning, was signing them, giving them to Fand, it was the talk of the event. It was one of the most extraordinary political events I've ever seen in Germany. Ulrich Seagmund's party is the alternative for Germany, the AFD. He is the lead candidate for the AFD in the selection of Saxony and Health. If the party finds its way to power after the election,

3:14then Zeagmund would become the first right-wing nationalist leader of a German state since the Second World War. We've talked about the AFD a lot on the show and their rise. We know that Elon Musk is a fan. They have been kept out of power for a long time in a country haunted by it, Nazi past. Is it actually possible that they could gain control now? Yes, it is possible. And this is the first time that they've had a genuine chance of attaining meaningful power in Germany. The AFD has basically been locked out of power at the state level, as well as at the federal level by what the Germans call a plant-mower. This basically means that no other mainstream party will work with it or form coalitions with it. And the reason why it might be different after this weekend is that the AFD actually has a chance of winning a majority of seats in the Saxony and Health Parliament on its own. Europe has a lot of far-right parties. Just remind us exactly what the AFD stands for. Moralists every country in the European

4:19Union has its own populist-right nationalist party. But if you put these parties on a spectrum, then the AFD certainly sits on the more extreme end. Several other right-wing populist parties refuse to work with it, including the National rally in France. It's anti-immigration, of course, but it goes beyond that. It wants it into the right of asylum. It rallies behind this new-ish slogan, re-migration, which for some people is a kind of ethno-nationalist, white-nationalist concept. It's pro-Russian. It wants to restore energy and diplomatic relationship with Russia and the Germany to stop its support for Ukraine. And maybe most of all, and this is what I really picked up at this rally in Zerv's. It's got this really intense anti-elite streak. It regards all of the other parties as what are called cartel parties. And now it's time to give this other lot, the alternative for Germany at chance. This, of course, is a state election, not a national election. What could they actually do at a local level? A lot of the stuff that the AFD is best known for

5:24is not in the gift of a state government, and certainly not a small one like Saxony and Health. That doesn't mean that the party has not thought very clearly about what it wants to do if it does win power in Saxony and such. They've got a 258-page manifesto, which taken together is really an extraordinary document that in some respects, and party officials will confirm this, serves as a sort of a blueprint for the transformation of Germany. It gets into a lot of detail on education both for schools and for universities. They want to segregate classes. They want the children of refugees and disabled children to be taken out of mainstream schools. They want to restore exchanges with schools in Russia. They want more Russian language teaching. They want to rewrite curricula. One of the more striking things is they want to focus on the 19th century achievements of Germany and less of what they regard as a succession with the crimes of the Nazi regime. There's loads and loads and loads of stuff in there. You've laid out a very alarming agenda. Could

6:29they make that happen? That's the really interesting question here because I think there's very good reasons to think that they would really struggle. I think there's two main reasons for this. One is that Saxony and Health does not have a lot of money. It owes about 25 billion euros. It relies on vast transfers from the rest of Germany to keep itself afloat. The AFD has made expensive promises on childcare, on policing, on a whole bunch of other stuff. It's also vowed not to take on any new debt and independent analyses confirm that basically the sums don't add up. That's one thing. The second thing is that precisely because the AFD has no governing experience at all other than in a couple of rural municipalities. There's a real question of whether it has the competence to actually do this. Many people crucially inside the party, inside the AFD, don't think that they

7:31necessarily have the administrative chops to be able to get moving as quickly as some people would like them to do. I think there's a lot of doubts over how much of this quite radical program they would be able to implement. What records do existing institutions have to push back? So I've been talking to individuals and organisations who might be affected by an AFD government, and they have been planning for months for the prospect of the AFD in government. Earlier this year, the Parliament in Saxony and how changed its rules for electing judges and the state parliament to ensure that the AFD would not be able to turn things upside down. Outside of Saxony and how the interior ministers of the 15 other states of Germany have been thinking about if it comes to it, excluding their AFD colleague from Saxony and how because they would be worried about sensitive national security information chaired between the states that would fall into the wrong hands and hear their thinking particularly of Russia. So there's a lot of planning going on about how to

8:36respond to an AFD government. And how is the possibility of the AFD winning in Saxony unhelp going down with local voters? There are plenty of people who are thrilled by the prospect of an AFD government. They're the people that I met in Zepz. There are obviously many, many people and I've met them in different parts of the state who were absolutely horrified by the prospect. We've been talking about what would happen if the AFD wins power in Saxony unhelp. The very first thing that would happen, I think, more or less a guarantee, is that the day after the election, you would see widespread protests, probably not only in the state, but across Germany because this would be such a shock to so many people. In the longer term, I spoke to lots of people in the state who say that they or people that they know would consider leaving. And this is a state that cannot afford to have a whole bunch of skilled workers leave. And one of the sad ironies of this situation is that now that it looks like there's a genuine prospect of the AFD taking power. And because if they don't take power,

9:37the coalition needed to stop it would be so incoherent and complicated. There are a lot of people who quietly will tell you, well, maybe we should just let them do it and they're going to cock it up. They've got no money. They've got no competence and everything will be a disaster. And then they'll lose the sheet of invincibility and then we can come back and clean things up. But that line of argument is not really something that you hear from people in the state. They will tell you, we do not want to be your testing ground. We do not want to be your laboratory. If the AFD take power here, we are the ones who are going to have to live with this every day. Tom, thank you very much. Thank you, Rosie. This economist podcast is sponsored by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. With AI-powered automation,

10:37Bill isn't just moving money. They're simplifying financial operations for nearly half a million customers. Bill has securely processed over a trillion dollars in transactions. That's proven infrastructure. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital one.com slash bank, Capital One NA member FDIC.

11:38The American tech firm Palantir made a name for itself among defense types and spooks in the early 2000s. It's been controversial in its way since the start. Frazes like techno militarism and surveillance state often thrown around. I mean, it's named after the all-seeing stones of J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction. By now, it's found its way into almost every arm of America's defense apparatus and it's gone looking for other customers in the private sector and abroad, in particular in Britain. Palantir is a really American company. Two-fifths of its contracts come with the American government, but Britain is its biggest foreign market and home to a sixth of its workforce. Georgia Banjo is a Britain correspondent for the Economist. In the past few years Palantir is one a string of government contracts with the National Health Service, with the Armed Forces and the police, among others. Now, their software does a really good

12:43job of joining up disparate data, but the company itself is also attracting a lot of controversy. Well, let's start with what exactly they're doing in all of these contracts. What's the promise? So Palantir is essentially trying to solve a very big problem. If you look at public services, a big problem is that data is often really disjointed. So you have police that's been more time doing admin, logging into lots of different systems than actually solving crimes. You have nurses running around on wards, having to write stuff down on paper because their electronic patient records don't work. It's a problem. And Palantir offers to solve that. What they do essentially is there a software company that helps turn that data into actionable data flows, who that's ways of presenting it that can help non-techy experts like you and me to understand it. It's already been used in the Armed Forces to help a commander work out where a plane is and

13:44how close it is to a certain target. It's also been used in the police to help solve crimes. So because Palantir can analyse data very quickly, it helped them crack one case with the Romanian gang where they were able to sort through 100,000 messages, something that usually take months. So there's lots of useful use cases, but the most controversial has been in the NHS. And why is that? Why is that any different? So in 2023 Palantir won a contract with the National Health Service to build a federated data platform. Essentially this is a platform that does what it says. It's federated, so it helps parts of the NHS join and link up their data. But it can also be used by Trust for basic back office functions, but also to run tools on top of. So one example is there's a cancer tool which can help a trust to track patients through their cancer treatments, flagging on their behind on their appointments, letting staff update records. So why is any of that controversial?

14:46Palantir is definitely a lightning rod and I think that's for several reasons. They've always had a reputation for being outsiders. So their CEO, Alex Cobb, even joked about it on a recent earnings call. He said that he's struggling to come to terms with Palantir's recent popularity. And we should disclose here that carp used to sit on the board of the economist parent company. But Palantir often create their own vibes. So it's chairman Peter Teal, his name for lecturing on the anti-Christ. Palantir's technology has been used to help ice to track and to put migrants in America and Israel to target garsens. And in Britain it should be said as well. They're also named for their really aggressive lobbying. So a lot of what they do is controversial. But mostly this is about Palantir's politics or the policy of the people who work there. So I think the politics get a lot of attention. One problem with the NHS contract is Palantir has used statistics which aren't exactly reliable. So there's one claim they like to make that

15:51because of Palantir's software, the NHS has performed 110,000 extra operations. Now that's just not true because for technical reasons the data isn't reliable but Palantir have continued to use those statistics. Another genuine concern is the risk of vendor locking. So that's the issue that with any technology a government or a client can get too dependent on a company's services and then that company can basically charge what they like for them. That is a concern but that's a feature of a need tech contract really. With any tech contract, civil servants certainly need to be savvy. They need to make sure that they're using software which is useful and they need to try to be open to using other options. But the last concern that comes up a lot with Palantir is this concern about digital sovereignty. Particularly when America seems perhaps a less reliable partner than it used to be and Trump is known for making brush statements about what he'll do to other

16:52countries. And so because of that, countries including Britain are now thinking twice about importing American tech. So the suggestion here if there are all of these worries around Palantir that Britain should have some sort of homegrown alternative? Exactly and that would be a great suggestion if there were British alternatives. So a slight issue with this debate is as much as many would want to for example use a British partner with the NHS. The simply isn't that capability at the moment? In which case the detractors would say just cut ties with Palantir anyway? Exactly. So what we're hearing a lot at the moment is lots of people suggesting exactly that. So there was a recent select committee which came out with a report urging the government to exercise a break clause with the NHS contract. So that means from next February the NHS could stop using Palantir without breaching the terms of their contract. Recently we've also had London's

17:55Mayor, the Deacon, block a deal with Palantir to stop the metropolitan police from using their software. He's saying that there wasn't an open competition process that's now in court. And lots of people are suggesting that Britain should start to look towards domestic alternatives. Now the one issue with that is that there aren't necessarily those alternatives already in place which creates a problem when you're trying to stop or pause contracts. This starts to sound like a rock in a hard place situation. I mean what's your take on what should happen here? Yeah it's very difficult. It's now a very live issue. So responding to Mercedes-Carn's decision to block the contract, the Metropolitan Police's commissioner, Samarq Rowley, said that the lost productivity would mean the force had to cut hundreds of frontline staff. There's clearly an impact there. If you're worried about dependence in the NHS, just look at Oracle which supplies a lot of the NHS's patient records. Look at Microsoft,

18:57you know, staff can't log into their systems without Microsoft. They use it for their communications, they use it for AI, they even use it for the cloud. And then obviously if you look at defence, if you look at our nuclear deterrent, essentially if you're going to worry about sovereignty, there are far bigger things to worry about than Palantir. And so I think as much as the politics is changing, we do have to think rationally and seriously about the position Britain is in. Public services, frankly, are in a mess. And it's clear that although Palantir has exaggerated times, the effects and the impacts of its software, the problem that it's solving is real and the technology seemed to be useful. On balance, while I understand some of the concerns about Palantir, I think a lot of the controversy about it is overblown. Thanks very much for joining us, Georgia. Thanks, Jason.

19:59This is 85 degrees of black tea. This is milk tea. I recently dropped by my local Chok Revive shop in Shanghai. This is a Chinese chocolate brand. Don Wainland is our China business and finance editor. This is very cheap. This is a sanai tea. This is... When I stepped in the shop assistant laid out all these different varieties of chocolate that they had. I sampled some. There was a strawberry flavored one, passion fruit, hazelnut. The assistant told me that Chok Revive makes all of its chocolate here in China. And I was really surprised by both the variety and the quality of it all. Because China is really not known for its chocolateeers or for its chocolate. But that is changing. There's a new generation of Chinese

21:02chocolateeers that are starting to crop up in this country. So first off, why isn't chocolate already a big thing in China? Well, it's not a local product, Chinese desserts tend to not be very sweet. One thing that's popular here is red bean paste. This is a typical filling for local pastries. But chocolate really doesn't feature very prominently in any of these local desserts. It's also more expensive than your average Chinese sweet. The chocolates that I ate were around 58 uM or 100 grams. That's pretty pricey. That's around $10. You can buy a meal for two in a lot of places in China for that amount. That is to say, you just don't see chocolate around when you go to the grocery store. You can find it in the grocery store, but it's not a super popular thing. You can really see that in the consumption figures. China consumes around 2% of worldwide chocolate. That's a very,

22:05very small amount given how big this country is. The average Chinese person eats around 100 grams a year. That's a hundredth of what the French person consumes. And when you do see chocolate here, it's usually a mass-produced foreign brand. So companies like Mars, Ferreros, Nestle, Hershey, these are the types of companies that are producing around four fifths of the chocolate that is consumed in China. Given that the appetite is clearly so low in China for chocolate, what do you make of this push to make the fancy version of it? So you wouldn't think that this is a great time to launch a new, expensive product in China. Consumer confidence is really weak. Shoppers are cutting back on non-essentials. So if you look at imported products like wine, this has been shrinking in recent years. But the founder of Chalk Revive, who I spoke with recently, said, it is possible to find a local market. You just have to make your product more Chinese. So he's incorporating Chinese fruits into his chocolate. He's

23:09investing heavily in the supply chain here. He's one of the first people to really ever do what's called bean to bar, which means sourcing your beans from Africa. And then doing all of the actual processing here in China, that will eventually bring down the cost. He has a research and development facility in China. It's one of the first of its kind. That's going to lead to more expertise in this industry developing around chocolate making. So I think when you start adding in those elements, you might eventually get a bigger market. But is this sort of a one man push to create a market as Chalk Revive, the only company at the moment doing this? So the reason why I decided to write about Chinese chocolate is because I've never seen a local chocolate brand develop at this level. Chalk Revive started with around 80 outlets, the beginning of 2026. It's aiming to have 300 by the end of the year. It's sales are growing incredibly rapidly. So it made about 160 million you and last

24:13year. That's roughly $24 million. It's hoping to quadruple that by the end of the year. This one company really stands out. I should say though, there are a number of other companies that are trying to do the same. There's a brand called Nibbo, which has been winning international chocolate awards. There's another company called Saturn Bird, which is planting cacao trees in southern China, trying to really develop a local cacao industry. So will Chalk Revive succeed in the end? Will it be the top winner? Who knows? But it does seem like within a couple years we will see a real serious chocolateeer in China. Don, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you. That's it for this episode of The Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.

25:29With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Turns supply, see Capital One dot com slash bank Capital One N A member FDIC. This podcast is brought to you by Thompson Reuters. The best don't just do their work. They change what's possible. Cases one, audits completed, jobs saved. Behind every one of those moments is a professional who needed to get it right. And did Thompson Reuters builds the technology that sharpens insights, speeds up decision making and powers the outcomes that matter. So when professionals act,

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