American media loves a political bunfight, especially an intraparty one. The New York Times reports that moderate Democrats are preparing for war with the party’s progressive wing after the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan state primary this week. The Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, says that it plans to spend $15m (€13m) to help defeat the democratic-socialist movement, as embodied by the likes of El-Sayed and New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

For a party that should be on the upswing, thanks to the general unpopularity of Donald Trump, spending money against a wing of your own party is obviously not a good look. But nor are many of the prescriptions of democratic socialism, not simply because they’re further left but because their chief ideas are not new. “Medicare for All”, the key policy platform of El-Sayed that would bring an NHS-style system to American health care, is a well-worn topic. So are promises to “take money out of politics”.

The current battle among the Democrats is largely about whether moderate common sense or stick-to-your guns progressivism is the best way to defeat the Republicans in November’s midterms. Progressives present themselves as the ones with the passion, beliefs and conviction needed to oppose Trump’s Maga ideology, compared to the moderates sorely lacking in identity and backbone. But the focus, for both sides, should be less on who’s most passionate and more on new and innovative ideas. Let’s be clear: Medicare for All is a pipe dream in a country as hopelessly divided as the US, something that has been talked about for decades without ever having a real path to becoming law. So is abolishing ICE. For all the agency’s faults and misuse under Trump, it’s responsible for monitoring US borders. How about some pragmatic, daring, left-wing fixes for American health and border security that actually have a chance?

Agree or disagree with his approach, Trump has upended traditional policy and got things done: for example, through pressurising pharmaceutical companies to sign deals giving the US “favoured nation” status, thereby lowering drug prices. It’s a surprisingly statist bit of intervention from a Republican president (one that Democrats probably wish they’d thought of) but at least it’s something new. Democrats need bold-but-enactable policies in response. Because while they might succeed in rallying their own voter base by keeping the state-run health-care dreams of Bernie Sanders alive, it won’t win them elections in moderate swing states.

The UK’s prime minister, Andy Burnham, has made some steps in this direction: a more left-leaning Labour leader than his predecessor, Keir Starmer, he’s started off with practical fixes aimed at tackling the spiralling cost of living. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is an example from the other end of the spectrum, a right-winger who preached political stability (a rare feat in Italy) as a means of staying in office. Therein lies the rub: any anti-establishment candidate who enters government still has to adapt when their ideals collide with the realities of office. If we really want to rebuild trust in politicians, why not try campaigning on things that are actually enactable?

The point here is that, whether they’re progressive or moderate, fresh ideas are the way forward. Democrats of all stripes need to work together ahead of November to reform their manifesto and expand their voter base, rather than merely playing to their die-hard supporters. Trump was re-elected in 2024 not by his base but because of inroads he made into minority communities, independents and even younger voters. Democrats can wring their hands as long as they like about how he achieved such a miracle but it’s a reality that still needs to be addressed by the party. Otherwise, despite an unpopular war and the rising cost of living, Republicans will once again hold on to Congress in November.ublicans will once again hold on to Congress in November.

Milan is a city of bakeries. In some areas, it feels as though there’s one on every street corner, peddling the sweet delights that Italians often start their days with (we’re thinking pistachio-cream-filled croissants). In recent years, a new wave of bakers has been setting up shop alongside old-school businesses. From spots serving ancient grains and cinnamon rolls to babka and cruffins, here are five of Monocle’s favourites.

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Signor Lievito
Run by Latvian baker Natalia Nikitina, a resident of Milan for more than 15 years, Signor Lievito is a small Nordic-inspired bakery located in Porta Romana. You can place online pre-orders for bakes ranging from cinnamon rolls and lemon cruffins (a cross between a croissant and a muffin) to flan parisien (a vanilla custard tart) and pick them up the following morning to avoid queues. The shop’s design was overseen by Hannes Peer (who recently worked on Merano’s Hotel Aurora) and features terracotta tiles, abstract line drawings and a Foglio wall light by Tobia Scarpa. One thing: this bakery’s name definitely sounds better in Italian. In English, it translates to “Mr Yeast”. 
Via Maestri Campionesi 26; signor-lievito.com 

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Tondo
This tucked-away spot in the Isola neighbourhood refers to itself as a “radical oven” for artisanal bread. Set up by Silvia Cancellieri in 2020 and focused on sourdough, Tondo cares deeply about the provenance of its raw ingredients, including the organic flour. Bread is always centre stage here, with special loaves made from ancient grains and buckwheat. Pick up a slice of speciality focaccia or a brioche filled with cream and topped with blueberries. Planning on staying in Milan a little longer? Tondo also teaches courses in bread- and focaccia-making.
Via Cola Montano 12

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Davide Longoni
Davide Longoni arguably set off the new wave of bakeries in Milan. His café-cum-bakeries mean that you can sit down for a coffee, juice and a pastry, or alternatively take away a loaf. Longoni uses grains grown south of Milan and sells everything from dried pasta to wine. His shops have expanded into nine locations, two of which are inside markets. Longoni is also a serial entrepreneur, opening a vegetarian Indian restaurant Govinda in the city centre and founding food magazine L’Integrale in 2020, which is run by Iperborea publishing house.
Various locations; davidelongoni.com 

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Slow Bread Lab
This off-the-beaten-track bakery might be the best spot for bread in Milan right now. To reach the shop, visitors must ring a doorbell and walk through an inner courtyard, where they can enter the kitchen to buy takeaway goods. The space was founded by husband-and-wife team Michele Dogati and Kaisli Kiuru, who changed professions to open the business. Kiuru says that they bake pastries and seeded loaves with the same love as when preparing something for their own family – and we would be hard-pressed to disagree. After picking up a loaf, cross the street to visit another Monocle favourite, Balay, for Philippine-inspired dishes.
Via Achille Maiocchi 29

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Pan
“This is the kind of space that you can find in New York, London or Tokyo,” says Pan co-founder Alice Yamada. “But it was missing from Milan.” She has a point: the Japanese-inspired bakery and café that she founded with business partner Yoji Tokuyoshi wouldn’t look out of place in any of the world’s great metropolises. Its clean neutral tones, prevalence of wood and flashes of green details seem to be going down well with punters, if the tables of people eating ham-and-cheese shokupan (Japanese milk bread) sandwiches are anything to go by. Yamada and Tokuyoshi turned to Studio Wok for the interiors with sage-green drapes hanging from the ceiling, which are inspired by noren curtains. Recent additions include takeaway counter Piccolo Pan and lunch-focused Pan Deli in Porta Nuova. 
Various locations; panmilano.com 

Were it not for graphite, you would presently be staring at a blank screen. The naturally occurring carbon is a crucial component of the batteries and cooling systems of phones, computers and electric vehicles – and demand for it is expected to cause severe deficits by the end of the current decade. For Western countries, this might prove especially testing. As things stand, China enjoys a near-monopoly of battery-grade graphite, controlling 95 per cent of global supply – and Beijing has demonstrated during its ongoing trade war with the US that it is prepared to at least threaten to restrict exports.

Graphite is therefore worth going a long way to get. Late last year, Greenland’s government granted UK-based mining company Greenroc Strategic Minerals a 30-year licence to extract graphite at Amitsoq, in the south of the vast island. The graphite deposit is not a new discovery – there was a mine there from 1914 to 1922, before demand tapered amid a general economic slump after the First World War. But it is known that the graphite at Amitsoq is the good stuff. 

“It’s really rich,” says Stefan Bernstein, CEO of Greenroc Strategic Minerals. “And with graphite, it’s not just about how pure it is. It’s also about the physical properties of the flakes. The main market for graphite today is for anodes in lithium batteries and there you need to change the morphology – the shape of each grain. So it’s not just a question of how clean you get the graphite but also the shape and size of the grain.”

Greenroc hopes to begin extracting this treasure by 2030. “We are aiming for production of about 80,000 tonnes per year,” says Bernstein. “Who knows what Europe’s graphite demand will be in 2035 or so but the mine will provide between 10 and 15 per cent of it.” Bernstein adds that the new Amitsoq mine will also generate about 200 local jobs, with 50 people on site at any one time and most of the workforce commuting by boat from the small town of Nanortalik. “Most other mines in Greenland rely on a fly-in, fly-out workforce,” says Bernstein. “We’re hopeful that we can have a very strong local engagement in the mine, and have people working in it who will still be able to maintain a normal life, like in a mining town in the UK 50 or 60 years ago.”

The EU has granted the Amitsoq mine strategic project status under its Critical Raw Minerals Act – a designation that accelerates the issuing of necessary permissions. Greenland itself has served, this last year or so, as another reminder that Europe needs to look after itself. Indeed, for one bizarre week back in January, it looked like it might need to find a way to defend Greenland from the US. Donald Trump is not the only person taking a close interest in what might lie beneath the ice.

“There’s definitely a boom in interest and investments right now,” says Bernstein. “Mainly from the US and Australia. There’s a close connection between a lot of the investments that we see now and the growing importance of Greenland in a geopolitical context.”

Quality-of-life rankings are all the rage these days – in part spurred by Monocle’s own annual list – but sometimes it’s worth introducing an indefinite article and considering the quality of a life. Because as the general gist of years proceeds into decades, you start to realise that quality is not a constant – what constitutes a good life at 25 rarely resembles one at 45 or 65. 

But in the three Australian cities that made Monocle’s latest Quality of Life Survey – Sydney, Melbourne and Perth – we see that it’s possible to have a national quality-of-life ecosystem; a sort of countrywide relay in which each city takes the baton for life’s various stages. 

Sydney
Sydney’s central playground is its harbour, which divides the city but unites Sydneysiders. As a deckhand in my teenage years, I came to know the harbour better than most. But I’ve never ceased to be astonished by its big blue belly, the bottle-green coves that shallow into little blond beaches and mangrove creeks rusting in the setting sun.

Like all paradises, Sydney is a great place to grow up and grow old. It’s a diurnal city: locals rise at dawn and settle at dusk. Children enjoy a playing-outside-until-dark childhood, the loss of which elsewhere in the world is the lament of many parents. It’s safe, sun-drenched and – given that sport is as central to Australian life as SPF50+ and going barefoot – there’s no shortage of activities to keep the ankle-biters occupied. This means that it’s also the sort of place where, if you ask about the nightlife, they will tell you about the possums, bandicoots and flying foxes (none of which, sadly, are names of bars). 

The water dictates almost every aspect of metropolitan life: where we socialise, how we get around and, above all, what we aspire to. The local religion is real estate; nirvana a mere matter of “water views”. But this property obsession does not make for easy living when you’re a young adult. 

Melbourne
The Victorian capital doesn’t have all that bother of panoramic beauty – and without the pressure to live a perfect life, you can have an interesting one instead. While Sydney encourages early risers, Melbourne convinces you to stay out late, to order that post-dinner espresso and find the next bar on Smith Street. 

Hence the city’s embrace of a shabby-chic aesthetic and why, once my twenties were in full swing, the grungier and more open-minded Melbourne seemed like the place to be. The city enabled me to live in diverse inner-city suburbs, where you didn’t have to be a ring-tailed possum to go out at night. There’s always something to do, with vibrant music and art scenes, perpetual sporting action and excellent dining options (don’t be dismayed by the lack of Michelin stars, because Australia has its own system using hats). And Melbourne’s well-earned reputation as a coffee capital means that you’re never far away from a perky piccolo. 

Perth
In this national relay, Perth is the curve runner. Melbourne’s possibilities make it an ideal setting to explore yourself but when middle age creeps up on you in a pair of orthopaedic sandals, you might want more space and less clatter. The consistency and stability of Perth means that it’s the Western Australian capital’s time to shine.  

Now, I might not have lived in Perth but the more time that I spend in said sandals, the more I realise the subtle attraction of a smaller city that has its act together. To settle down, spread out and make a laid-back lifestyle your own, Perth is hard to beat. After all, on the city’s riverine foreshores you can enjoy more hours of sunlight than any other Australian city. What is more, multiple recent infrastructure projects have smoothed links between the city, the airport and the suburbs. Sometimes you need to go to the world’s most isolated major city just to get away from it all. 

Timing is everything 
But at the end of all our urban exploring, the baton returns to Sydney for life’s final straight. We prize balance once again, we want ready access to both the slow road and the fast lane. We want to start the day with an early-morning swim, a cappuccino at the surf club, and finish it with a harbour cruise to a show at the Opera House. 

One city cannot be expected to meet your quality of life needs forever. Our priorities shift as we grow into different versions of ourselves. Australia’s cities are not only highly liveable but also meet us where we live, decade after decade. When it comes to the quality of a life, Australia has it all.

For more on what makes some cities deliver a better quality of life, join us at The Monocle Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon from 3 to 5 September.

Stroll across Singapore’s historic Anderson Bridge, minutes away from the Central Business District, and the skyline gives way to something improbable: a vast, open stretch of grass. Known as the Padang (Malay for “field”), this ground has been at the heart of some of the country’s most significant events. It hosted post-Second World War victory parades, National Day marches and – since British colonisers set aside space in the 1830s to listen to the nostalgic thwack of leather on willow – cricket matches. 

The Singapore Cricket Club (SCC) was founded in 1852 by 28 members of the British mercantile community and military officers. Spectators watched on from the sidelines until a simple wooden pavilion was built as its clubhouse in the 1860s, followed by a larger structure in 1877 as membership grew. The preserved iron-structures and brick extensions of today’s clubhouse, built in 1884, contrast elegantly with the built-up skyline behind it.  

Within the club’s membership base – for which fees start from S$4,000 (€2,690) a year – are generations of the same families that made up the club’s earliest years. Today, nearly 5,000 Singaporeans and expats gather under the same colonial-era roof to play cricket or rugby – but also to discuss business deals while sipping a cool Tiger beer. “We protect a sense of belonging by engaging across age categories,” says club president Martin Goerojo, an avid sportsman and long-time member. “Junior, open and masters competitions are all interlaced with social events.”

After a match, players and members alike spill into the clubhouse to fraternise and feast on dishes of chicken congee, seared Hokkaido scallop and lobster risotto. Beyond the table, members mingle through games of chess or mahjong, or take part in wine tastings. The institution’s staff – from the car-park attendant to the barman in the underground Men’s Bar – make a point of recalling members by name. 

While the clubhouse itself is a listed building, the SCC is open to change. The Main Lounge, recently refurbished by local firm Studio HP, turned to the tones and textures of art deco for inspiration. Under the guidance of the practice’s founder, Rashi Tulshyan, dark reds and burgundies blend with the original wood panelling of the central bar. Hints of tropical modernism are referenced in the bespoke carpet, which features fan-shaped motifs inspired by the ubiquitous traveller’s palm. 

As the club prepares to celebrate its 175th anniversary next year, Goerojo reflects on what lies ahead. “The club has become an integral part of the surrounding ecosystem, and we are always asking ourselves how we can add value,” he says. “Ultimately, it is about being guardians of the Padang.” 
scc.org.sg 

Monocle’s annual Quality of Life Conference is back. After more than a decade of globetrotting, we’re returning to Lisbon, the city that first hosted our flagship event. For three days, Monocle comes to life as readers, speakers, and editors gather to exchange ideas and explore how we might live a little better.

Part conference, part urban retreat, it is designed to create a space for meaningful conversations and fresh perspectives, a chance to step away from the everyday, spend time with interesting people, and leave with new ideas and useful connections.

In October 2024 every Swedish household – more than five million – was sent a bracing pamphlet entitled “In Case Of Crisis Or War”. Prepared by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, it offered counsel on household preparedness – which foods to stash, how much water to store – and how to respond if the balloon, of one sort or another, went up.

It wasn’t the first time that Sweden’s government published such a thing – the tradition dates back to 1943, as the country sat out the war then consuming the rest of Europe. But the latest edition acknowledges lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic and the fact that Sweden is no longer a neutral country but instead a member of Nato committed by treaty to the defence of 31 other countries. The most sobering injunction reads “If Sweden is attacked, we will never surrender. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

Sweden has taken another step towards making flesh this spirit of resilience with the announcement of its first national strategy for psychological defence. Launching the strategy, Sweden’s minister of civil defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, spoke of a need to strengthen Sweden’s “resilience in the cognitive domain”. The country has grasped that there are – especially now – many more ways to threaten, unnerve or undermine a country than pointing missiles at its capital or arraying troops along its borders. The first of the four pillars of the new strategy for psychological defence is “work against undue influence of information”.
     
Sweden has – like pretty much every other western country, whether those countries understand it or believe it or not – been a regular target of Russian disinformation campaigns. This goes back years: from 2015 to 2016, state-owned Russian news outlet Sputnik operated a Swedish language service, in which, according to Sweden’s Institute of International Affairs, it published roughly 4,000 articles, many of them negative stories about the EU and/or Nato. Not coincidentally, in 2022, Sweden’s Ministry of Defence established a Psychological Defence Agency, tasked with resisting foreign-influence operations.
    
The Russian threat to Sweden has since grown somewhat more sophisticated and aggressive. In the past couple of years Russian hackers have targeted Swedish digital services and energy infrastructure but disinformation campaigns are ongoing. They’re cheap, easy, deniable – and, so long as people remain eager to consume whatever nonsense reinforces their prejudices, effective. Earlier this year, Russian media floated the false and, you would hope, obviously absurd story that King Carl XVI Gustaf, having taken the trouble to visit Ukraine, refused to shake the hand of Volodymyr Zelensky in order to express some obscure grudge over the 1709 Battle of Poltava, in which the army of Carl XVI Gustaf’s predecessor Charles XII got clobbered by the legions of Peter the Great. The director-general of the Psychological Defence Agency, Magnus Hjort, responded with admirable clarity: “Absolutely nobody cares about this in Sweden.”
     
The national strategy for psychological defence is part of a minor blizzard of related initiatives from Sweden in recent weeks. Stockholm has also announced the creation of a new foreign-intelligence service to be known as the UND, its first national strategy for ensuring security of supply, and its intention to increase access to civilian shooting ranges. The Nordic nation’s European neighbours and allies might chafe at any suggestion that they take lessons in this sort of stuff from a country that hasn’t fought a war since a minor scuffle with Norway in 1814 but they – we – should. Sweden is taking seriously one of the most basic principles of resilience, military and otherwise: better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
 
Andrew Mueller is a regular Monocle contributor and host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe today.

Curious about how the US-Israel war with Iran is affecting air travel? Take a look at Flightradar24. The flight-tracking website shows where airborne planes are at any given time – and there is next to nothing above Iran. Flight traffic is also diminished over Iraq, where existing aircraft consist almost entirely of Iraqi carriers or those flying between the Middle East, Armenia and Azerbaijan. On the other hand, Saudi airspace is as busy as ever, and a narrow corridor across the Caucasus between Iran and Russia is now used by many Europe-to-Asia flights.

The conflict in Iran is putting immense pressure on route planning, operating costs and reliability, and negotiating turbulent geopolitical tensions and daily airstrikes have once again become the norm for the aviation sector. But the industry has shown that it is one built on adaptability, whether in response to airspace closures, fuel sourcing or other crises.

Even so, recent developments are putting that adaptability to the test. In July, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) reinstated its warning to avoid Gulf airspace, though a number of flights are still travelling to and from the region. Some carriers have extended cancellations to services while others, such as Finnair, have announced that they are suspending their flights to Dubai – a busy and profitable route – until October of this year at the earliest. Gulf carriers, on the other hand, have little choice but to use this difficult airspace if they want to fly at all, and most are doing everything they can to maintain a regular schedule.

A number of air carriers recently reported their second-quarter financials, showing that while higher airfare and increased consumer demand have helped to absorb a portion of operation costs, long-term projections remain uncertain. Still, the overall system is continuing to function: oil is flowing at major airports and some airlines are making profit. But even as flight planners and air-traffic control systems work to find viable routes, the rising cost and fuel shortages could send reverberations through the industry for months or years. 

As the crisis in the Gulf drags on, Europe has managed to find new ways to source oil and keep things moving, including importing from the US. Ironically, this has positioned the North American nation, which now exports more oil than any other country in the world – 10.5 million barrels per day at its recent peak – as something of a stabilising influence. Meanwhile, willing Asian nations have imported record levels of oil from Russia and countries including Japan have diversified imports by drawing from the US, as well as African and Latin American states. However, the reduction of Persian Gulf supply remains a significant loss, which means we will likely see spikes in price and renewed fears of supply issues in coming months.

And yet, as we saw at the Farnborough International Airshow, which wrapped on 24 July, the industry continues to move forward with what could only be described as stubborn optimism. Companies are placing orders for aircraft and pursuing new innovations, including incremental gains in efficiency as well as entirely new technologies. Any day now, Heart Aerospace’s X1, the largest battery-electric aircraft to ever fly, is due to take its maiden flight. 

While most of these developments won’t solve the pressing headaches of today, it’s a reminder that aviation plays a long game, with its eyes on the horizon. The industry has seen it all before, in one form or another.

When we’re asked if there’s a morality to air conditioning, let’s focus on the smaller scale and ask instead: what keeps you cool? What is cool? What’s really cool? There are things that say they’re cool, offering a nod and a wink and a promise of refreshment. But many are lacking; many are operating under false pretences.

Such as? Well, denouncing ice cream in high summer might seem like madness but bear with me. No one is saying that gelato is not magnifico – but is it cooling? Does the speedy absorption of 600 calories of sweet milky goodness wick the beads of perspiration from your brow? It doesn’t, does it? Ice cream, a cone of plenty in a world of slight returns, is a marvel that cheers on the cheap. However, buy it, lick it, love it – but don’t expect to get a degree cooler thanks to it, my friends.

Instead? Pour a double espresso over a big ice cube in a tumbler, add enough full-cream milk to fool yourself that it could have come in a cone and feel the mercury drop with every sip. Coffee, with its kick of jittery caffeine, keeps you cool. Do it with ice-cold brown tea from the fridge, too, (no milk, though, are you mad?) and feel the depthless pleasure of your hot body zooming down toward the temperate zone quicker than you can wonder, “Would this be nice with some gin in it?”

Aha, we’ve raised the spectre of the proper drink. Can booze be cooling? A frosty beer, a pale and flinty rosé, an ice-cold martini, surely? Well, it saddens me to break the habit of a lifetime in recommending a short, sharp shock of something meaningful but you might end up with a hotter collar, a moister clavicle, a wetter lip than when the garçon popped your cork in the first place. Wait until you’re in the shade, though, and enjoy an everything-out-the-freezer martini, the vodka (better in the heat) viscous as the mercury that you’re hellbent on besting.

Of course, a Japanese konbini or a Don Quijote are predictably awash with excellent accoutrements for getting, staying – but sadly not looking – cool. Lion Brand cooling sheets are excellent for the puffy calves and feet of heat (and have been known to be used on the forehead). I’d like to say that I’d attempted the more sensitive areas of the anatomy but the pads’ robust adhesion means that even ripping them from a slightly hairy calf is a take-a-deep-breath moment. The thought of conducting this operation on more delicate areas makes the mouth dry at the very thought. 

The frozen eyemask, a Japanese summer favourite that has spread sporadically westward, is a complete joy on a hot night in bed. Again, start with your brow and see where you go. I’ve found that almost everywhere likes being cool. Make sure this is a private affair, though: few others will want to see you trussed up in a turquoise eyemask at the best of times.

Finally? Fans. There are many battery-powered hand-fans about and I don’t want to begrudge a hot face a cold solution but they’re not a great look, are they? However, the concertina fan – the Penguin Classic to its rivals’ Kindle – is an elegant solution to any number of hot onslaughts and coquettish to boot. Fluttering a fan is a good look: it’s honest and it’s for everyone. It’s eco-conscious and it’s stylish. 

It turns out that there are plenty of ways to keep cool. But bear in mind that your office might benefit from some proper air conditioning by Daikin, Midea or Mitsubishi – nobody needs to see the accounts team tearing into a pack of those cooling sheets.

Robert Bound is a contributing editor at Monocle. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Before being elected president of Colombia last month, Abelardo de la Espriella, a 48-year-old criminal defence lawyer, had been living amid Miami’s splendours with his wife and four children. He became a US citizen, donated enough to the Republican Party to be invited to Mar-a-Lago, and then returned to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, from where he hails, to announce his presidential candidacy. On Friday 7 August, he will be sworn in. 
 
His victory reflects more than just the appeal of an extravagant personality. Colombians voted against the continuation of Gustavo Petro’s presidency and the growing insecurity associated with his tenure. Faced with a staunchly socialist senator, they chose De la Espriella, the lawyer of choice for dodgy Colombians seeking plea bargains with the US. Colombians preferred a political novice with a lavish Florida lifestyle to a seasoned figure of the left.

The choice further contorts the political balance of the Americas. De la Espriella’s programme is firmly on the radical right, recalling Donald Trump, Javier Milei and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. He speaks of cutting state spending, abandoning the 2016 peace accords with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and restoring relations with Israel. He disparages the UN and promotes religion and traditional family values. At last week’s inauguration of Peru’s new right-wing president, Keiko Fujimori, De la Espriella’s vice-president shook hands with Argentina’s Milei, who confirmed that he would attend Friday’s ceremony. This is not a pack that has any plans to work with the left. Cuba and Nicaragua will be cut further adrift from the region while the White House has earned another friendly neighbour. 

True to what he calls “De la Espriella Style”, the president-elect’s campaign wardrobe boasted slim-fitting suits, linen shirts, football jerseys and dark sunglasses. Travelling by private jet, he promised with considerable fanfare and effective right-wing showmanship to wrest power from the political establishment and the capital of Bogotá. 
 
Wherever De la Espriella campaigned, he voiced a powerful national grievance: that Colombia is governed by a distant capital that neglects its regions. He has said that he will not move into the presidential palace, instead taking the presidency around the country (a move we’re also seeing from new UK prime minister Andy Burnham). Foreign affairs and international travel, he says, will largely be handled by his vice-president.

He has also made clear that his victory enjoyed the approval of Trump and US secretary of state Marco Rubio. To demonstrate his closeness to Washington, De la Espriella sent his veep to the White House in mid-July with a pledge to fight organised crime and drug trafficking, while presenting Colombia as an attractive destination for foreign investment. Under his rule, Colombia will become the “country of miracles” – at least that’s what he keeps repeating. 
 
But much remains uncertain. Only last week, De la Espriella announced that he will take his oath in the city of Cali. He has not visited Bogotá since the election, and said that he will convert the presidential palace into a museum. Barranquilla, a northern city where he lives with his family, will now become an alternative capital. 
 
De la Espriella is taking devolution to an entirely new level. But the Caribbean disruptor-in-chief personifies a genuine national sentiment. With theatrical effectiveness, he voices one of Colombia’s most persistent complaints: that it is ruled by a snobbish clique that cares little for the rest of the country. De la Espriella presented himself as a prodigal son, promising each region the attention that it has long been denied.
 
His fiercest opponent is the outgoing president, Petro, who is urging his well-organised supporters to mobilise if his government’s achievements are reversed. Petro even raised the prospect of hunger strikes and national protests that could paralyse the country. 
 
It is still too early to know how De la Espriella will handle the more concrete challenges. Colombia’s debt and deficit are at unprecedented levels, and he might need to find about $30bn (€26bn) to cover the fiscal shortfall. Some 30,000 members of armed groups linked to drug trafficking and organised crime control large stretches of the countryside. An unusually severe El Niño effect on the climate could also strain the power system and threaten blackouts. And, from Friday, Colombia will have a right-wing president, but also, for the first time, a highly organised left-wing opposition.
 
Wherever De la Espriella chooses to govern from, he will confront a central fact of Colombian democracy: the country has institutions capable of frustrating a leader’s wishes. Neither his impulses nor his supporters’ expectations have the force of law. That restraint will matter. He will succeed only if he delivers something concrete without weakening the institutions that stand between presidential power and presidential whim – and without leaving Colombia, literally or politically, in the dark.

Silvana Paternostro is a Colombian-American journalist and Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
 
Further reading:
– One drug-smuggling scandal shouldn’t bring down brand Thailand

– Trump’s new Air Force One plane is bringing the president down to earth 

– Who is Andy Burnham? From Manchester mayor to the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years