Watch | Did Emmanuel Macron get shoved in the face wife Brigitte? His ‘horsing around’ reply | World News
French President Emmanuel Macron found himself at the centre of a viral moment when a video showed his wife, Brigitte, giving him what looked like a firm shove to the face just before disembarking a plane in Vietnam. Caught in a glimpse of presidential PDA — of the pushy kind, Macron said, it was all in good fun.
It all started as Macron was standing in the doorway of his plane set to aboard his presidential aircraft, only to have two hands suddenly appear and give his face a firm shove — one over his mouth, the other cupping his jaw. As he recoiled and then quickly smiled and waved to the cameras below, the clip immediately went viral, triggering headlines, speculation, and conspiracy theories.
‘Geo-planetary catastrophe’
According to Macron, there was no mid-air domestic dispute or awkward fallout — just a bit of marital playfighting.
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“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” Macron said on Monday while speaking to reporters in Hanoi, Vietnam. “Somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe,” he added, clearly amused the attention. “Everyone needs to calm down.”
The short but meme-worthy moment got viral as the French presidential couple landed in Vietnam to kick off a Southeast Asia tour. Brigitte, clad in a bright red jacket, wasn’t immediately visible when the plane door opened — until her hands suddenly appeared, pushing her husband’s face in what many thought was a sign of tension. Macron’s brief look of surprise before switching to a smile added to the intrigue.
French media wasted no time in weighing in. As per a report Associated Press, Le Parisien wondered in a headline: “Slap or squabble?” while social media lit up with hot takes and even accusations of a diplomatic incident in the making. Some suggested the couple had fought, while others labeled the moment a “snub” — especially since Brigitte declined to take Macron’s arm as they descended the stairs.Story continues below this ad
The Élysée Palace initially downplayed the moment and later clarified: this was just a light-hearted exchange. “It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip horsing around,” said a source close to the presidency, as reported AP, calling it a moment of “complicity.”
Still, Macron used the incident to make a broader point about life in the age of hyper-viral content. “The videos are all real,” he said, “but people are attributing all kinds of nonsense to them.”
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