Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to the French press this week and passed on a message to the people. ‘Your children are not going to die in Ukraine,’ he said.

He made his remarks 24 hours before the French parliament voted on a bilateral security agreement that Zelensky signed with President Emmanuel Macron last month. The vote, which went the way of the government by 372 to 99, is symbolic but it allowed parliament to voice their opposition to Macron’s recent belligerent rhetoric towards Russia. The left-wing La France Insoumise voted against the agreement, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally abstained.

A leader without a child is more likely to think only in the short term, of their political legacy

Le Pen reiterated her support for Ukraine but criticised Macron’s recent ‘warlike announcements’, which she said risked provoking an ‘aggravation of the conflict’. She also accused Macron and government of indulging in ‘cheap party politics’ ahead of June’s European elections. This was a reference to recent jibes by some of Macron’s ministers about the National Rally’s ambiguous attitude in the past towards Vladimir Putin.

In a fiery exchange with Le Pen last month in the National Assembly, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal brought up this ambiguity (Le Pen visited Putin in Moscow in 2017) and remarked: ‘You have to wonder whether Vladimir Putin’s troops aren’t already in our country. I’m talking about you and your troops, Madame Le Pen.’

Attal’s attack was direct and retaliatory, a response to an indirect barb made by Le Len about Macron the previous day. The president had used a speech in Prague to suggest that deploying ground troops in Ukraine was an option. His comments drew criticism from all sides of the French parliament, and Le Pen was particularly scathing: ‘Macron plays the war leader, but it is the lives of our children that he speaks about with such carelessness,’ she said.

It was a calculated tactic to talk about children. Le Pen has three, one of whom will provide her with her first grandchild later this month. The news was leaked to the press late last year and Le Pen is naturally delighted. Not just personally, but also – so it’s claimed by a confidant – professionally because she is attempting to cultivate an image of ‘the mother of the French’. Apparently, many of the National Rally’s apparatchiks call Le Pen ‘tata’ (aunty), just as François Mitterrand was known within the Socialist Party as ‘tonton’ (uncle).

Emmanuel Macron is the first childless president of the Fifth Republic (Georges Pompidou and his wife adopted a three month old baby) and Gabriel Attal is the first childless prime minister. When Le Pen talks about children she is emphasising this fact to the nation: it’s not Macron’s children who might one day have to go off to war, or Attal’s, it’s ours.

Le Pen has stolen her filial strategy from her niece, Marion Marechal, the vice-president of Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest and the party’s leader in June’s European election. In interviews she drops in the fact that she is the mother of two young daughters. Speaking after a 16-year-old boy had been stabbed to death in a village dance last November, Marechal remarked: ‘I don’t want to live in a country where my daughters go to a party in a village of 500 and come across guys like that.’

In a recent interview, one of Marechal’s colleagues in Reconquest, Guillaume Peltier, outlined why he thinks having a child matters in politics. ‘Parenthood is an experience that puts down roots and forces you to prepare for the future, turning you away from narcissism and offering you the perspective not of the moment, but of the long term,’ he said. ‘It’s no small thing that our two most senior leaders, the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, don’t have any children of their own.’

This isn’t the first time that Macron’s childlessness has been raised. In 2017, the Washington Post pointed out that of the G7 leaders, five didn’t have children: Theresa May, her Japanese and Italian counterparts, Shinzo Abe and Paolo Gentiloni, Macron and Angela Merkel (although Macron and Merkel do have stepchildren). Only Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump were parents.

Several other western leaders at the time were also childless: Nicola Sturgeon, Leo Varadkar, Stefan Löfven (PM of Sweden), Mark Rutte of Holland and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the EU Commission. The Guardian ran an irritable op-ed criticising the idea that anyone who didn’t have children – particularly a woman – was in some way abnormal. It rather missed the point.

When a generation of political leaders is childless it does matter, whether it’s education, health care or mass immigration. A leader without a child is more likely to think only in the short term, of their political legacy. They are less interested in what their country might look like fifty years down the line because they have no ‘skin the game’, so to speak. As any parent will tell you, myself included, your perspective changes when you bring a child into the world.

Zelensky has two children, a 19-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son. In an interview with the BBC last year, Olena Zelenska, described how the war was affecting her children. ‘It pains me to watch that my kids don’t plan anything,’ she said. ‘They dream of travelling, of new sensations, emotions.’ For security reasons, she and her children no longer lived with Zelensky, and family time was rare. ‘My son misses his father,’ said Zelenska.

Those words would have resonated with many thousands of Ukrainian families who have been separated by the war. That is why being a parent does matter in politics. It gives you a bond with your people and underlines that your kids matter as much as your career.