A short video clip showing Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, seemingly pushing or slapping him inside a presidential aircraft has gone viral.
The incident has triggered widespread speculation, conspiracy theories, and heated debate on social media and international media circles.
The moment was captured as the couple arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday evening for the start of a Southeast Asia diplomatic tour.
The video circulated widely and was taken just as the plane door opened to reveal the French President. Within seconds, when two arms identified as Brigitte’s, wearing a red jacket, reached out and seemingly spanked his face, covering part of his mouth and jaw. Macron appeared surprised before realizing they were live, and then quickly smiled and waved to the camera.
In another suspecting move, as the couple descended the aircraft’s stairs, Macron offered his arm to his wife, a customary gesture for public appearances. Still, Brigitte did not take it, holding onto the handrail as they walked side by side.
The clip immediately set off a media storm, with the French outlet Le Parisien asking in a headline:
“Slap or ‘Squabble’? The Images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron Disembarking in Vietnam Trigger a Lot of Comment.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1926938963870097430
In a press briefing in Hanoi on Monday, May 26, President Emmanuel Macron dismissed the claims that the interaction was aggressive or problematic.
“There’s a video showing me joking and teasing my wife, and somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe,” Macron said.
“We are horsing around and, really, joking with my wife.”
He also claimed the footage was used to fuel misinformation.
“The videos are all real. Yes, sometimes people tamper with them, but people are attributing all kinds of nonsense. Everyone needs to calm down.”
Initially, officials at the Élysée Palace, France’s presidential office, denied that anything unusual had happened. But after the video went viral, they offered a different tone, describing the moment as harmless and misinterpreted.
“It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around,” said an Élysée source.
“It was a moment of complicity. No more was needed to feed the mills of the conspiracy theorists.”
The official also noted that the clip had been quickly picked up by pro-Russian troll accounts, many of which have previously spread disinformation about Macron, including a recent fake claim that he was caught using cocaine on a train to Ukraine.
Just earlier this month, a fake news story claimed Macron was hiding a bag of cocaine during a diplomatic train journey to Kyiv. The Élysée publicly debunked the claim with a social media post showing the object in question was simply a tissue, captioned:
“This is a tissue. For blowing your nose…”
