The Monocle Minute

After all the talk of potential recounts and court challenges, the result was obvious within hours of the polls closing. As crowds of dejected Democratic supporters melted away, red baseball caps bobbed feverishly in the November night. Many pundits and pollsters had hedged their bets, saying that the outcome looked too close to call, but in the end it wasn’t close at all. The so-called year of elections has been a bad one for incumbent parties and this one, the biggest of them all, was no different.

Democratic postmortems will be long and painful, and take place in the background of a Republican jamboree, as the Grand Old Party revels in a result that appears to have delivered control of both the executive and the legislature. As to what that control will engender, even some of those closest to Donald Trump will be unsure about what his next administration will bring.

Despite ominous talk of a polarised nation and a Manichean struggle for America’s soul, this campaign was short on policy proposals and therefore bereft of substance. Whatever else can and will be said about the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president of the United States, he has won an astounding victory and completed a remarkable political comeback. Trump has also shifted the dial, perhaps irrevocably, on issues such as immigration and international trade. Unless his second term is an absolute flop, it will be very difficult for any future candidate for this office to make positive arguments for either. And so, as the pendulum of US politics swings back to the right, it’s hard to see a way out of the chaos that has defined the past decade. We are all living in Trump’s world now.

Alexis Self is Monocle’s foreign editor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Washington is waking up to the reality that Donald Trump has won a second term in office, becoming only the second president to ever win non-consecutive terms and lurching the United States back to the hard right (writes Christopher Cermak). Four years after Joe Biden famously declared “America is back”, the world will once again have to deal with a more isolationist and transactional US president, a figure whose unpredictability is as likely to test the nation’s traditional allies as its enemies.

Expect Trump to bring in a team of loyalists who will be less likely to block his policies than his first-term cabinet. He will have the backing of the Senate and, possibly, the House of Representatives, which could allow him to introduce a sweeping domestic agenda. And Democrats, who plumped for Kamala Harris in a chaotic campaign that began with an ageing Biden at the helm, will have little time for recriminations as they consider how to mount a viable opposition in defence of their own agenda, and perhaps of American democracy.

With Thessaloniki’s long-delayed metro set to launch on 30 November, authorities have announced a set of discounted fares to nudge locals out of their cars and onto the new train. The ticket price of just €0.60 per ride will be in place for the first six months across metro and bus lines and there will be a 10-ticket bundle for €5.80, which will include the 11th ride for free.

Officials hope that the low prices will ease the city’s infamous traffic jams and shift commuting habits, alleviating environmental and infrastructure pressures on the centre. But for Thessaloniki’s car-loving residents, the metro will need to prove its worth. Affordable tickets can draw curious riders but it would take a consistent, well-designed service to make them regulars. The metro, a €3.5bn project whose completion date has been the butt of a joke to Greeks for the past 20 years, could be a game-changer. But the city will need to get the details right.

The 2024 edition of Paris Photo, the French capital’s international photography fair, returns to the freshly renovated Grand Palais today. With 240 exhibitors from 34 countries showing under the venue’s vast glass roof, here are three things you shouldn’t miss if you are planning to visit.

Jim Jarmusch’s homage to surrealism
The US film director and visual artist was announced as Paris Photo’s guest of honour back in September. For this year’s edition, he was tasked with putting together a selection of works that pay homage to surrealism in celebration of the artistic movement’s centenary. Alongside surrealism-adjacent works, Jarmusch will also be premiering his latest piece, Return to Reason, a collection of films by Man Ray set to original music by Jarmusch’s own band Sqürl.

August Sander’s ‘People of the 20th Century’
This is Sander’s decades-long effort to document the daily lives of Germans from all walks of life in the years between the world wars and beyond, all meticulously organised according to the subject’s line of work, gender and social status. Though Sander never completed his work, it has been called “a landmark in the history of modern art” for its documentary ambition. Sander’s great-grandson Julian, whose Köln gallery is an exhibitor at Paris Photo this year, will be showing this work in its entirety for the first time in Europe.

The sharp visual explorations at the ‘Voices’
A new addition to Paris Photo, the “Voices” section features three thought-provoking collections selected by curators Azu Nwagbogu, Sonia Voss and Elena Navarro. Nwagbogu, the founder of the LagosPhoto festival, explores what happens when artists revisit archives (either their own or those of their peers) in “Liberated Bodies”. Sonia Voss’s “4 walls” is a poignant selection of creations that emerged from the privacy of rooms, particularly in Eastern Europe during coercive Soviet times. Elena Navarro, who shares her time between Madrid and Mexico City, offers an incisive and diverse showcase of up-and-coming visual artists from across Latin America in “Imperfect Paradises” – a reference to the region’s many contradiction.
parisphoto.com

Monocle’s editors and correspondents take you behind the scenes on the making of the magazine’s fashion pages. As our November issue hits newsstands, our design correspondent Stella Roos tell us about reporting the issue’s lead fashion story: a deep dive into Swiss heritage house Bally.