26-5-2025
A video has surfaced showing French First Lady Brigitte Macron pushing President Emmanuel Macron’s face aside as the couple disembarked in Vietnam to begin their regional tour.
Footage shot by the Associated Press news agency in Hanoi on Sunday evening shows Macron’s plane door opening to reveal him. His wife Brigitte’s arms emerge from the left of the open doorway, she places both hands on her husband’s face and gives it a shove.
The president appears startled but quickly recovers and turns to wave through the open door. She remains concealed by the aircraft body, making it impossible to see her facial expression or body language.
However, Mr. Macron downplayed the episode Monday saying they were just playfighting.
“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.”
Macron and Brigitte have been married since 2007. He met his much older wife while at school as student and his wife was a teacher.
The moment quickly made headlines in France, with media trying 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.”
