Whatever happened to the notion that, faced with the enemies of democracy, we should fight their ideas but, equally, for their right to express them? The answer, unfortunately, is that it died an ignominious death on Sunday, as Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau, with the full support of the European Union’s liberal establishment, banned far-Right candidate Cǎlin Georgescu from running for president.

What makes this cherished principle’s death personally unbearable is that I detest the likes of Georgescu, just as I oppose with every sinew of my body the Nationalist International of which he is a part. So, why the pain? Because I cherish my right, and duty, to defeat them at the ballot box — and I shall challenge to my last breath the liberal totalitarians who deny me this right, this duty.

Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau justified its ban on Georgescu with the allegation that the candidate “violated the very obligation to defend democracy”. This is preposterous. The right to vote and to stand for election is exactly that: an unearned right automatically afforded to anyone with the correct passport and the capacity to breathe. Unlike a medal or a university degree, it is not an award or a privilege to be earned. The moment anyone — a judge, a commissioner, even a wise philosopher king — acquires the power to limit that right, a new power is created to restrict the franchise which is by definition anti-democratic.

Before anyone reaches for the “naïve liberal” or “useful idiot” labels, hear me out. I grew up under a fascist totalitarian regime. I know ultra-Rightists better than most. As a kid, I watched them beat my mother, abduct my father, and imprison my favourite uncle. If given the chance, these people will happily set up authoritarian regimes while luring the masses with toxic delusions of grandeur. Yet nothing reinforces them more than the sights and sounds of liberal totalitarianism at work: ideological judges and electoral commissions banning them as if to prove that everyone is in on it, and that democracy is just a cover for the stealthier form of authoritarianism.

To those who are prepared to turn a blind eye because Georgescu is allegedly a Kremlin plant, I have a question: can you really not see what a magnificent gift this ban is to Putin? How he is loving the spectacle of liberal Europe copying his methods of eliminating a political opponent? And to those who fear Trump more than Putin, I have another question: how smart was it for the EU, weeks after JD Vance accused Europe of endorsing the dissolution of Romanian democracy, to vindicate him?

---

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist and former Greek Minister of Finance. He is the author of several best-selling books, most recently Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism.

yanisvaroufakis

---

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.

---

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

miquelvilam

---