PARIS – Just before embarking on a Southeast Asia tour, French first lady Brigitte Macron was seen playfully pushing President Emmanuel Macron with both hands on his face as they exited their plane. This playful interaction, caught on camera, led to a buzz back in France, although the president brushed it off as mere fun.
French news channels on Monday examined the incident caught by the cameras just as the plane’s doors opened. Le Parisien questioned in their article, “Slap or ‘squabble’? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment.”
Macron later clarified to reporters that the couple, who have been married since 2007 after meeting while he was a student at the school where she taught, were just engaging in some light-hearted jesting.
“We are horsing around and, really, joking with my wife,” he said, adding that the incident was being overblown: “It becomes 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.
The video — taken as the Macrons arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday — showed a uniformed man 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 — reached out and pushed 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.
Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children, when they met at his high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Emmanuel Macron, a literature lover, was a member.
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.
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