The conviction of Marine Le Pen is the latest stage of Europe’s “descent into the abyss of totalitarianism”, according to former Greece finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. Earlier today, the Rassemblement National parliamentary leader was found guilty of embezzling European Union funds, and is set to be banned from running for public office for five years.

Varoufakis told UnHerd that the charges against Le Pen were “laughable and ludicrous”, and that to make them “a jailable offense and also a reason to bar her from running in the presidential election” was “mindboggling”. He added: “It really worries me that the liberal establishment is doing its utmost to strengthen the appeal of the neofascist Right in Europe […] Either the law applies to everyone or it applies to no one.”

The economist has previously criticized the electoral ban of Romania’s Right-wing presidential frontrunner, Cǎlin Georgescu, labeling the decision “preposterous”. Today he compared that ban with the RN politician’s conviction, stating: “The Romanian case was the dress rehearsal. Now, they’ve moved on to Le Pen. Tomorrow, they’ll go after Jean-Luc Mélenchon.”

Another point of comparison for Varoufakis was the ongoing political crisis in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s imprisonment of his main political rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Ímamoğlu, has provoked widespread protests against the government. Erdoğan is “laughing his head off as he’s watching this descent into the abyss of totalitarianism by the European Union,” Varoufakis said today, “because how can they disabuse him of what he has done, which is exactly the same?”

Like Ímamoğlu, Le Pen has consistently polled as the most likely winner of the next presidential election. Even her political rivals have condemned today’s verdict, with Éric Coquerel of the Left-wing La France Insoumise saying: “I don’t agree that things that should be decided by the ballot box are decided by the courts. It will only paint the National Rally as a victim.” Varoufakis agreed with this assessment, posting on social media this afternoon that “France’s neofascists will only benefit from this.”

Varoufakis stressed that “I think Le Pen is a fascist, personally. I’d like to see her be destroyed politically.” At the same time, in his view, lawfare “has been disproportionately waged against the outer Right, because the Left has disappeared”. The Greek politician compared Le Pen’s treatment to the means used by the Democratic Party against Donald Trump, only “the French are doing it in a more obvious, less defensible way than the American Democrats.”

Varoufakis, who attacked the attempted shutdown of the National Conservatism conference in Brussels last year as “farcical authoritarianism”, highlighted a 2016 guilty verdict for Christine Lagarde on similar charges to Le Pen, also in a French court. She kept her job as head of the International Monetary Fund, and has since become president of the European Central Bank. “Nobody has made a peep about [her previous conviction],” Varoufakis observed today. “I have zero trust in the capacity of the judiciary to act as a judiciary, in France and more broadly.”

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Rob Lownie is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

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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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