Marine Le Pen sat down in front of the cameras of French broadcaster LCI and said the sentence European cabinets have been avoiding for three years running. The war in Ukraine, she said, leads to two things and neither of them is peace: either NATO goes in directly and that is a Third World War, or Europe is looking at a new Hundred Years' War - a conflict spanning decades with no end.

The phrase was not thrown out at random. The Hundred Years' War was a sequence of conflicts between England and France from 1337 to 1453. Le Pen has been using it since January 2023, when she warned the French National Assembly that gradually supplying ever larger quantities of weapons leads exactly there.

"The war has already lasted longer than the First World War"

Her chronology is correct. More time has passed from 24 February 2022 until today than from the start of the First World War on 28 July 1914 to the armistice on 11 November 1918. That is a fact anyone can check, and almost nobody says out loud.

Le Pen called the war "a real slaughterhouse" and mentioned two million casualties. That figure should be taken as her estimate - she did not specify how many are dead, how many wounded, how many missing. The difference between those three categories is enormous, and that is exactly why the number has to be read with caution. But even without it, the substance of the sentence holds: this is the longest European war of the living generations.

Where she draws the red line

The question was put to her in the context of France possibly committing its aircraft to protecting Ukrainian airspace. Le Pen backed Emmanuel Macron's decision not to send Rafales over Kyiv - a move that would, in her view, turn France into a direct participant in the war.

Helping Ukraine and NATO waging direct war on Russia are not the same thing to her. That is a distinction that has all but vanished from public debate - anyone warning about the danger of escalation is automatically taken to be somebody's man, while anyone demanding more weapons passes as principled. Le Pen is calling for an international peace conference, at the same table as Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Turkey and other key states. France's historic role, she says, is precisely to create the conditions for negotiations.

Who has the privilege of not thinking about this

It is easy to dismiss her words as a political position ahead of a presidential election - and that is partly true. But the question she opens is not erased by having been asked from the wrong mouth. If the war really does last another ten years, who in Europe has a plan for that scenario? So far every strategy has rested on the assumption that the end is coming soon.

In the Balkans we know this without lectures. Conflicts here did not end with a signature but with exhaustion, and that is exactly why the consequences dragged on for decades. When someone in Paris says Europe risks "a new Hundred Years' War", in Brussels it sounds like rhetorical exaggeration. From here it sounds like a description.