French President Emmanuel Macron downplayed viral footage showing what appeared to be his wife, Brigitte Macron, shoving his face with both hands as they exited their plane in Hanoi on Sunday, dismissing it as playful "horsing around" ahead of the start of their Southeast Asia tour.
"We are horsing around and, really, joking with my wife," Macron told reporters Monday. "It becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe," he said, mocking the media attention the brief moment attracted. "In the world we live in, we don't have a lot of time to lose" on such matters, he added on France's BFMTV.
The incident was captured through the aircraft's just-opened doorway as Macron prepared to disembark in Vietnam, the first leg of his multi-nation tour of the region. The video shows the French president standing inside the plane, speaking to someone off-camera. Suddenly, two hands in red sleeves reach out and push his face-one covering his mouth and nose, the other on his jawbone. Macron recoils momentarily before turning, smiling, and waving at onlookers.
Macron slapped by his wife Brigitte. pic.twitter.com/cZDzdgPZnq — RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) May 26, 2025
Brigitte Macron, dressed in a red jacket, soon appears next to him. The president offered his arm as they descended the aircraft stairs, which she did not take. The two walked down side by side on the red-carpeted steps.
French media widely circulated the clip, sparking speculation and headlines like Le Parisien's: "Slap or 'squabble'?" The élysée Palace issued a statement calling it "a moment of complicity" and said the couple were simply decompressing before the start of their diplomatic mission.
"It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around," Macron's office stated. "It's a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists."
Neither Macron nor his wife directly addressed the incident beyond the president's public remarks. The couple, married since 2007, met while Macron was a high school student and Brigitte a drama teacher at the same school. Their relationship has been the subject of French tabloid fascination for years.
Macron's trip to Vietnam is the first by a French president in nearly a decade and includes stops in Indonesia and Singapore. On Monday, France signed agreements with Vietnam that include a deal for 20 Airbus aircraft and cooperation in defense and space.
