Macron Says He and His Wife Were ‘Joking’ When She Shoved His Face in Airplane Doorway
The incident is captured as his plane door open at the start of a multi-nation trip in Southeast Asia.
Was it simply a love push? President Macron says a video that captured his wife pushing him away with both hands in his face was a joke.
The moment was captured right before they disembarked from their plane in Vietnam at the start of a tour of Southeast Asia that will include visits to Indonesia and Singapore.
The video was captured on Sunday as his plane door was pulled open upon landing in Hanoi. Two arms — in red sleeves — reached out and pushed Mr. Macron, with one hand on his mouth and nose and the other on his jaw, the video captured by the Associated Press showed.
After appearing shocked, Mr. Macron noticed he was on camera and smiled and waved. Mr. Macron and his wife, Brigitte, then appeared at the top of the stairs with her in a red jacket. He offered his arm but the pair walked down the carpeted stairs side-by-side after she appeared to rebuff the offer.
“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” Mr. Macron told the press on Monday. He added, “It becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
The president’s office, after first denying the incident happened, also tried to minimize it. “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 was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” his office said.
An AI-generated video of the couple descending the stairs quickly appeared on social media. The fake video showed Ms. Macron repeatedly shoving the French president.
Mr. Macron said other recent videos of him have been misrepresented, like ones that circulated on social media claiming to show him with a bag of cocaine on a plane. He said it was simply a tissue. “None of these are true, Mr. Macron said, and “everyone needs to calm down.”
Mr. Macron met his wife when she was his drama student in high school. She was married and 24 years older than him, Reuters reports. She later divorced and the couple married.
