The polyglot business leaders, government workers and researchers gathered for the annual spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seemed reassured by the Trump administration’s actions thus far, though still anxious about what coming months could hold.

“I believe that the current administration after 100 days has been more moderate than was expected. And I think we need to reinforce such behavior,” said Felipe Calderón, the former president of Mexico.

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Speaking on Friday from the House of Sweden, an airy glass building on the Georgetown waterfront adjacent to the Swedish embassy, Calderón said he was sure that there were “rational people” inside the Trump administration and that he believed “several of them are listening.”

“They are struggling each other. But our role is to put the right arguments to prevail,” he said.

It was an attitude shared by many of the bureaucrats, business people, economists and aid workers who gathered at the IMF and World Bank buildings in downtown D.C. to attend seminars, pore over Excel spreadsheets and sip wine as the days drew to a close.

While the attendees were a diverse group, they largely belonged to the class of “global elite” maligned by far left and far right political campaigns, including Trump's. And they were deeply uneasy about how the recent surge of nationalist and protectionist movements in wealthy countries might affect them and their organizations.

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Trump’s own campaign platform of stronger borders, protectionist economic policies and a retreat from international institutions has been mirrored in populist movements in Europe. Many have blamed the agenda of free trade and global integration backed by organizations like the World Bank and IMF for their countries' economic malaise.

Global markets surged on Monday as investors perceived the results of a runoff election in France as dealing a blow against the economic threat of populism after centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron gained the largest share of the votes. European and Asian stock markets soared on Monday, with France’s CAC up more than 4 percent at close. Wall Street stocks also closed on a high note, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq reaching record highs and the Dow Jones Industrial average and Standard & Poor’s Index both rising roughly 1.1 percent.

Yet far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who supports withdrawing France from the euro zone, was not far behind. Macron and Le Pen will face off in the election's deciding round in two weeks. Meanwhile, Britain is forging ahead with its decision to leave the European Union, and Germany and Italy are facing upcoming elections that could further disrupt Europe's integration.

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In the United States at least, the Trump administration has not yet translated much of the isolationism and protectionism espoused on the campaign trail into policy.

Congressional opposition — including from Trump's fellow Republicans — has so far stymied the administration’s plans for health care and tax revision. Trump also appears to be adopting a more conventional foreign policy, despite his pledges to withdraw the U.S. from its role on the international stage and concentrate on rebuilding at home. In recent weeks, he reversed his opposition to international institutions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Export-Import Bank, and presided over military strikes in Syria and Afghanistan.

When asked Thursday about his previous support for Brexit in a news conference with the visiting prime minister of Italy, Trump said that a strong Europe was “very, very important to me as president of the United States” and “very much to everybody’s advantage.”

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Short of a few steps — like the decision Thursday to launch an investigation into whether steel imports compromise U.S. national security — Trump’s pledges to renegotiate trade deals and slap tariffs on disagreeable trading partners also have not materialized.

In an interview on Saturday, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde asked Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to describe the administration's trade policy. She received a much more muted version than Trump touted on the campaign trail.

“The president believes in reciprocal trade deals and reciprocal free trade,” Mnuchin said, adding that if U.S. markets are open, other countries' markets should be open as well. “What’s not free and fair is if our market is open and other people either have high tariffs or have high import barriers.”

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“The bite has been way less intense than the bark,” said Mário Mesquita, chief economist at Itaú Unibanco, one of Brazil’s largest banks. “Things may change … but as yet they have been more cautious and more moderate than people feared right after the election.”

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Vincenzo Boccia, the president of an Italian manufacturing and service industry association called Confindustria, said his group was in a wait-and-see mode about the futures of both Europe and the United States.

Speaking through an interpreter in a cavernous backroom of the Italian embassy in Washington, Boccia called the United States “a symbol of economic freedom” for Italians, and warned that a protectionist turn could lead to less competition and innovation worldwide and spur other countries to follow suit in closing off their economies. “It will have a domino effect, and nobody will win,” he said.

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Erik Berglöf, an economist and the director of the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics who was in town for the spring meetings, worried that the administration could do the most damage by degrading or destroying international institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization, which the United States played the leading role in building in the decades after World War II.

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“Institutions like the World Bank and the IMF would amount to very little without the U.S. standing behind them,” said Berglof. “The U.S. used to effectively stand up for these core principles, but it can now equally powerfully undermine them.”

Berglof noted that, compared with past spring meetings, the IMF and World Bank appeared to be “hunkering down” to avoid attracting negative attention from the Trump administration. He said they appeared to be “suppressing the use of words like ‘protectionism’ and ‘openness,’ ” as well as “documents that can provoke discussions of these topics.”