Welcome to Beg to Beg to Differ. The Bullworks weekly roundtable discussion featuring

civil conversation across the political spectrum from center right to center left. I'm Josh Barrow. I'm sitting in this week for Mona Charon and I'm

joined by the regular panel of Bill Galston, the Brookings Institution in the

Wall Street Journal, Damon Linker of the week, and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

I ordinarily write the very serious newsletter on sub-stack. You can find that at Josh Barrow.

I also host the very serious podcast. Here on Beg to Differ, we're going to begin today with big news from France.

Centrist Emmanuel Macron was re-elected to another term as president of France,

and in the end the vote wasn't that close he beat right-wing nationalist marine

lapen by 17 points still that's down from over 30 points five years ago and there were

polls a few weeks ago that had this election actually pretty close to a tie

Damon the story of European politics

over the last decade or so has been this struggle

between an internationalist pro-European establishment

that includes traditional parties

of the center right and the center left

and on the other side, populist nationalists, more often from the right,

though sometimes from the left.

This result in France looks like a big win for the establishment for

centrist ideas on the economy, for European integration,

for a robust military alliance with NATO in the US

and against Russian aggression. Am I right to have that take on it that this is a win for the

center for the establishment and for NATO? Well I guess I would say that it is in the short term, obviously. I mean, this was a very big win. The margin was as big as, you know, we haven't seen a margin that large in the United States since

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