French President Emmanuel Macron downplays shove in the face from his wife

Brigitte Macron, the wife of France’s president, appeared to push her husband away with both hands on his face just before they disembarked from their plane to start a tour of Southeast Asia this weekend. 

President Emmanuel Macron dismissed the gesture — caught on camera — as just horseplay, but it caused a stir back home. French media on Monday tried to decipher the interaction that cameras spotted through the just-opened door of the plane. 

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 later told reporters that the couple 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.”

His office earlier offered a similar explanation. 

“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. 

Contact, then a wave

In video taken by The Associated Press as the Macrons arrived in Hanoi on Sunday, a uniformed man can be seen pulling open the plane door and revealing the president 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 while the other was on his jawbone. The French leader recoiled, turning his head away. Then, apparently realizing that he was on camera, he broke into a smile and gave a little wave. 

In subsequent images, Macron and his wife, wearing a red jacket, appeared at the top of the stairs. He offered an arm but she didn’t take it. They walked down the carpeted stairs side by side. 

The couple, who have a 25½-year age gap, married in 2007. They first met when he was a student and she was a teacher at his high school, married with three children, including one of his classmates.

Macron was once slapped in the face by a protester in 2021. The man ultimately received a sentence of 18 months in prison, with 14 months suspended.

Macron is making the first visit to Vietnam for a French president in a decade. On Monday, the countries signed deals on Airbus planes as well as defence and other spending worth billions in total as France seeks to boost its influence in its former colony amid risks of high U.S. tariffs.