Macron brushes off pushing from wife ahead of Vietnam trip
The video, taken Monday as the two were commencing a tour throughout Southeast Asia, shows Macron standing in front of the exit as the plane door is opened after landing in Hanoi. He is turned and appears to be having a conversation to his right, after which the French first lady's arms are seen pushing on his face, causing him to have to take a step back.
Macron then turns forward, smiles and waves to onlookers before going out of view. They then walked down the stairs from the plane onto the runway side by side.
He later told reporters that he and his wife were just joking around ahead of their visit to the country. He said the incident was being overanalyzed as a 'sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.'
'We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,' he said.
'Everyone needs to calm down,' he added, arguing that the incident should be taken as an example of caution about disinformation online.
Macron's office also later brushed off the incident in a statement.
'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.
The Macrons have been married since 2007. They met when the now-president was in high school and she was a teacher and supervisor for a drama club that he was in.
They married just more than a decade after first meeting, following Brigitte's divorce from her first husband.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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