French first lady Brigitte Macron was seen shoving her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, in the face while the couple was waiting to disembark their plane in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Video of the incident showed a uniformed man opening the plane door as Macron was seen wearing a suit and standing in the doorway. Brigitte Macron’s arms – in red sleeves – could be seen reaching out and pushing Macron away, with one hand covering his mouth and part of his nose while the other was on his jaw. The French president turned his head away but suddenly noticed news cameras capturing the moment. He quickly smiled and waved before exiting the door frame.
Macron and his wife later disembarked the stairs of the aircraft together. The French president offered his arm, though the first lady – seen wearing a red blazer – did not take hold of it.
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As the clip, recorded by The Associated Press, quickly went viral, Macron said that he and his wife were play-fighting.
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.”
Macron told reporters that the couple — who met at a French high school where he was a teenage student, and she was a roughly 39-year-old married teacher — were simply joking around. Emmanuel was 29 when he married Brigitte in 2007.
“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” he said, according to the AP, adding that the incident was being overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
The French leader argued that the images and reaction to them offered a cautionary tale about disinformation in the social media age.
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“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’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” his office said, according to the AP.
Macron’s office also reportedly told CNN that the clip showed a “moment of togetherness,” and that the French president and his wife were unwinding after a long trip and playfully teasing each other.
Macron is touring Southeast Asia this weekend.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
