The period of unusual stability brought to Italian politics by Giorgia Meloni’s Right-wing coalition is under threat. Former army general Roberto Vannacci — nicknamed Il Generale by supporters — is mustering an anti-establishment force to split the vote on the Right, with his National Future party this week polling higher than Matteo Salvini’s League party (from which it split earlier this year) for the first time, on 6%.

Vannacci’s focus on “remigration”, including a proposed quota for migrants in Italy set at 4% of the population, puts him to the Right of the ruling coalition. For Meloni, he represents a dilemma that is increasingly common among European nationalists: how to retain anti-establishment credibility once in power, in the face of accusations of “selling out” from insurgent political forces?

Since the election defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in April, Meloni has become the leading light of nationalism within the EU. Still, notwithstanding her instrumental role in forcing the bloc to the Right on migration, she is arguably in danger of becoming tainted by association with Ursula von der Leyen and other EU leaders. Among conservatives for whom hostility to Brussels is a key marker of authenticity, Meloni’s successful navigation of the bloc’s bureaucratic machinery is suspect.

For emerging nationalist leaders like Vannacci, Meloni and her Right-wing peers in government elsewhere on the continent have failed in their core task of fighting for sovereignty and national identity within the EU. “Either you are with us from National Future, guardians of nationalism and citizenship, or with von der Leyen, [Mario] Draghi, multinationals and globalism,” Vannacci doomily proclaimed last week. The increasingly ideological, ethnocentric nature of Right-wing thought leaves successful leaders like Meloni open to accusations of betrayal, creates opportunities for those professing a purer form of nationalism, and risks a damaging descent into the kind of factionalism and infighting typically associated with the ideological Left.

This pattern can be seen elsewhere in Europe, with Right-wing fragmentation especially prevalent in countries where religion provides a deeper ideological basis for socially conservative thought. Poland — a society which is arguably even more grounded in Catholic belief than Italy — is a cautionary tale. The country’s United Right, dominated by the Law and Justice party, claimed 44% of the vote in 2019; now in opposition, it polls at around 27% and continues to bleed votes to the anti-establishment Confederation Freedom and Independence (13%) and the ethnonationalist Confederation of the Polish Crown (9%).

In Hungary, meanwhile, the scale of Orbán’s defeat in the spring was partly attributable to a splitting of the Christian nationalist vote. The emergence of the rival Our Homeland movement, which won around 6% of the vote in both 2026 and 2022, can now be understood as an early warning sign of Orbán’s fading appeal. The veteran leader’s singular political achievement until that point had been his ability to retain, for 16 years, an anti-establishment authenticity that was at odds with his significant personal power and authority.

Right-wing unity prevails to a greater degree in countries where an establishment “firewall” has succeeded in keeping nationalist parties out of government. The factionalism that is a corollary of the ideological Right gaining power has not yet afflicted the AfD in Germany or France’s National Rally; lessons from Poland, Italy and Hungary suggest that once the firewall is broken, it surely will.

In Britain, a similar dynamic is at play. Rupert Lowe’s justification for splitting the nationalist Right — his belief that Reform UK is “managed opposition” — reflects a view among some voters that Nigel Farage’s party has lost credibility by welcoming former Tories tainted by power. The damaging impact of this fracture on the Right’s electoral chances was plain to see in the Makerfield by-election campaign.

With success breeding discontent for anti-establishment forces, the conflict between the responsibilities of power and the increasingly uncompromising demands of frustrated voters is a circle that Right-wing parties in Europe must learn to square. If not, they will never be safe — as Meloni is now finding out — from their own shadows.

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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