French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday shut down speculations of his wife Brigitte appearing to shove his face in a viral video while disembarking from their plane in Hanoi, Vietnam on Sunday. The couple are on an official visit to Southeast Asia.
The viral video made headlines in France with the media questioning whether all was well between Emmanuel Macron, 47 and French first lady Brigitte, 72.
Macron downplayed the incident and said, “We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” adding that the incident was being overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
The French president, who has been married to Brigitte since 2007 after meeting her at his high school where she taught, downplayed the footage and criticised the overreaction.
The Associated Press captured footage of the Macrons’ arrival in Hanoi, Vietnam on Sunday, showing a man in uniform opening the jet door and displaying the president standing inside, wearing a suit, and speaking to a person who could not be seen.
With one hand covering Macron’s mouth and a portion of his nose and the other resting on his jaw, Brigitte’s red arms were seen reaching out and pushing her husband away. The French president flinched and looked aside. Then, as if he had realised he was being filmed, he smiled and waved briefly.
Later photos showed Macron at the top of the stairs of the aircraft with his wife, who was wearing a red jacket. He extended his arm, but she brushed him aside.
Macron claimed that the pictures and the response to them served as a warning against misinformation in the era of social media, pointing out that other recordings have been used to spread false information about him in recent weeks.
“Calm down, everybody,” he said.
The incident was likewise downplayed by his office.
“It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” his office said.
When the duo first met at his high school, Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children. She was a teacher who oversaw the play club that Macron, a literature lover, belonged to.
Despite his vows to marry Brigitte, he relocated to Paris for his final year of high school. Before they were married, she divorced her ex-husband and then relocated to the French capital to be with him.