French President Emmanuel Macron's Southeast Asia tour kicked off with a cringe-worthy moment that immediately captured international headlines. When he stepped off an airplane in Vietnam, a short video showed what seemed to be his wife, Brigitte Macron, pushing or slapping him in the face.
The video captures the aircraft door opening and Macron stepping out into view. Within a matter of seconds, Brigitte appears to nudge his face sharply, making him take a split second of surprise. All the same, Macron took little time to regain his composure and gesture to journalists waiting outside.
As the couple walked down the plane steps, Macron raised his arm in Brigitte's direction, appearing to offer her his arm. She refused, instead grasping the handrail as she descended.
The video quickly spread on social media sites, with multiple iterations of the clip gaining over a million hits. Public gossip and opinion erupted on the internet.
First, the Élysée Palace brushed off the incident. Eventually, they made a milder statement, describing the moment as a light-hearted exchange. CNN reports officials saying it was "a moment of togetherness."
"It was a moment when the president and his wife were relaxing one last time before the trip started, joking around with each other," a source said to CNN on Monday.
Upon speaking to reporters in Hanoi, Macron reacted to the surrounding stories in regards to the clip.
"There's a video of me making jokes and poking fun at my wife and somehow that becomes some kind of geo-planetary disaster, with people actually coming up with conspiracy theories to justify it," he said, according to CNN. "The videos are genuine, and sure, sometimes people fake them, but people are reading all sorts of bollocks into them.
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