could care less whether the eu comes apart or stay together. but that s not the view of the mainstream who sees it as a bulwark of western unity. this election is just fascinating because macron has gone further than hillary clinton did in 2016 in essentially embracing the idea of global cooperation and kind of economic and political integration and kind of made this a starker choice where i think this is this, by the way, this does reflect the big choice facing democrats going forward. do you believe that a more populist and protectionist message a la bernie sanders can win back a lot of these blue collar voters disaffected from globalization and growing div tersety who are fueling france and donald trump here or does it look more like macron who is fiscally right of center pro global whose orientation is toward a white collar upper
take france out of the european union and collapse the european union, that would cause chaos in the western world. marine le pen has been very critical of nato. as has donald trump. he was saying that noito was obsolete, now changed his tune on that perhaps because he realizes the consequence of a weakening nato in terms of the western world and u.s. security. so i think that in terms of the long-term multidecade political and international interests of the united states and the stability of the western world, perhaps a macron victory would be seen as preferable by many people in washington. we ve talked a lot about how russia influenced the u.s. election. a weakened eu, a weakened nato that could possibly result from the prominence of marine le pen and perhaps her being president despite the difficulties she would have in getting her platform through the french legislature and there s going to be french parliamentary elections after the presidential
champs-elysees attack on this election, one could surmise that perhaps at least to 1 or 2 percentage points that the voters went to le pen this evening during the day today when they were casting their ballots because of that attack because she s strong on security and those kinds of issues. whether or not and in fact, macron s reaction after the attack was judged by a number of political commentators here as fairly weak. he just said that the french should not lose their courage and they should keep a stiff upper lip essentially. but in fact, le pen came out with a plan right away and said, you know, we ve got a plan for security. we re going to beef up security and terrorism is not going to happen on our watch and that sort of thing. and that might have had some appeal to voters today when they were in the voting booth. so going forward, where does that leave everybody? i think that, you know, the le pen appeal is going to be more on europe and more on the issues
to come up and sort of stand out. now it s head to head with marine le pen and the question, one question is is there enough white collar professional pro global pro europe support to counter act the real sort of frankly their hostility toward europe, hostility toward immigrants or just skepticism that, you know, that traditional politics, you know, can really help france, can lead it in the right way. so stephen, even with macron having a little bit of that establishment experience, does he in essence end up redefining what establishment politics is? that s what he s trying to do in many ways. the next big question in western politics and the united states and europe is if some kind of establishment politician can come up and answer the questions that donald trump and marine le pen have been posing, it s clear
in our election where hillary clinton did not motivate some of the same voters, but with macron and le pen you have this framed as precisely as you could. the runoff may 7 still a couple weeks away. these two candidates here, one considered a centrist and the other considered more pro nationalist. with a le pen win potential until that runoff, what do you see the potential ramifications for europe to be? a le pen win would be an earthquake for europe. until now i think there s been a lot of assumption that while marine le pen is a very strong voice for kind of a far right anti-establishment anti-immigrant wing of the french populous, she was not a majority candidate, she was not someone who would be able to assemble enough votes across the spectrum in france. but what you saw was donald trump running against hillary clinton, theresa may writing very much the strong kind of