French presidential couple ‘playfight’ on plane
French President Emmanuel Macron has urged everyone to “calm down” after footage of his wife, Brigitte, shoving him in the face went viral.
The moment was caught when the plane door opened for disembarkation after the couple landed in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday for a tour of South-East Asia.
A uniformed man can be seen pulling open the door and revealing Macron standing inside, dressed in a suit and talking to someone who wasn’t visible.
Two arms — in red sleeves — reach out and push Macron away, with one hand covering his mouth and part of his nose and the other on his jaw.
The French leader recoils, turning his head away. Then, apparently realising that he is on camera, he breaks into a smile and gives a little wave.
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In subsequent images, Macron and his wife, wearing a red jacket, appear at the top of the stairs. He offers an arm, but she doesn’t take it.
The couple then walked down the carpeted stairs side by side.
The moment quickly made headlines in France, with media trying to decipher the interaction.
The headline of a story on the website of the daily Le Parisien newspaper asked: “Slap or ‘squabble’? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment”.
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The viral video was originally rejected as a “fake” by Palais de l’Élysée.
Macron said later that the couple, who wed in 2007 after meeting at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher, were simply joking around.
“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” he said, adding that the incident was being overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe”.
Macron argued that the images and reaction offered a cautionary tale about disinformation in the social media age.
He said that in recent weeks, other videos had been used to circulate made-up stories that he’d taken cocaine with the leaders of Britain and Germany – when, in fact, he said he’d just been picking up a tissue – and that he’d had a muscular encounter with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, when they’d been shaking and holding hands.
“Everyone needs to calm down,” he said.
Macron’s office also downplayed the interaction.
“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 said.
“It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.”
Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children, when she and Macron met at his high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Emmanuel, a literature lover, was a member.
He moved to Paris for his last year of high school, but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to join him and divorced before they finally married.
