Macron

In a video taken by The Associated Press, the Macrons are seen arriving in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, May 25. A uniformed man pulls open the plane door, revealing the French president standing inside, dressed in a suit, and talking to someone who isn’t visible. Brigitte Macron’s arms — in red — are 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 leader recoiled, turning his head away. Then, apparently realizing he was on camera, he smiled and gave a little wave. In follow-up images, Macron and his wife appear at the top of the stairs. He offers an arm, but she doesn’t take it. They walk down the carpeted stairs side by side.

The next thing President Emmanuel Macron knew, he and his wife were making headlines in France. For example, the headline of a story on the website of the daily Le Parisien newspaper asked, “Slap or ‘squabble’?” It continued, “The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment.”

However, on Monday (May 26), the French president told reporters that he and Brigitte were joking. For context, Emmanuel Macron and his wife got married in 2007.

“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” President Macron said, 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. He noted that in recent weeks, other videos had been used to circulate made-up stories about him.“Everyone needs to calm down,” President Emmanuel Macron said. His 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,” the president’s office said.

This isn’t the first time the French president’s marriage has made headlines. Since they wed in 2007, there have been whispers and questions about how they met.

For context, Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children, when she and Emmanuel met at his high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Macron was a member. As a student, the now-president was a literature lover. 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.