Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Marie Le Pen

A politician’s tell is often in what he frames as inevitability. Le Pen casts the state as reluctant, even reasonable: it “would have preferred not to take a stand.” The passive voice does heavy lifting, laundering choice into circumstance. Then comes the true engine of the sentence: television. Not diplomacy, not moral obligation, not strategic interest, but the “constant presence” of images that supposedly drag a nation, against its will, into taking sides.

The subtext is a critique of mediated politics: screen-time becomes political pressure; visibility becomes legitimacy. But in Le Pen’s hands, that critique doesn’t land as a neutral media observation. It reads as a warning about contagion - foreign conflict spilling into domestic life via pictures, protests, and public emotion. By blaming the TV “screens,” he sidesteps responsibility while gesturing toward a familiar far-right suspicion: that public sympathy can be manufactured, that elites are forced to respond to imported problems, that the nation is being made to care.

Context matters. Le Pen’s career is built on turning geopolitical complexity into a story of national sovereignty under siege. The Israeli-Arab conflict, especially in France with its large Jewish and Muslim populations and a long colonial afterlife in North Africa, isn’t just “over there.” It’s a proxy for debates about immigration, identity, and social cohesion. The line’s intent is to rebrand taking a stand as defensive necessity - and to imply that the real culprit isn’t the conflict itself, but the modern public sphere that won’t let the state look away.