An awkward moment between French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, was caught on camera as the couple prepared to disembark from their plane in Hanoi, Vietnam, over the weekend.
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According to multiple media outlets, the moment showed Brigitte pushing her husband away with both hands on his face as the door to their plane’s sliding door opened. Macron looked at the camera, smiled, and waved before walking towards Brigitte. Except for her red sleeve, the French First Lady was not seen on camera.
Viewers from around the world quickly reacted to the video, with some believing it was an abusive moment.
“That’s awful to watch. Abuse is never ok,” one viewer wrote on Instagram. “Been with my husband nearly 20 years. We can have disagreements, sure, but no one puts hands on the other. No one. That’s a dangerous path to walk down and say it’s ok and it’s just how marriages are. Doesn’t matter who the aggressor is. This is sad to see, and wrong.”
Another viewer also wrote, “He put his arm out to do the gentlemen arm lock and she kept stepping. Wow. Not good.”
The couple is currently on their Southeast Asia tour, with their stop being in Vietnam. They will also be visiting Indonesia and Singapore.
President Emmanuel Macron Says He and Brigitte Were ‘Joking’ Around When the Plane Incident Occurred
Quick to defend himself and his wife, President Emmanuel Macron said the gossip about the incident.
“We are squabbling, and rather, joking with my wife,” Macron said, per the Associated Press. The French president also said the incident was being overblown into a “sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
“Everyone needs to calm down,” he then declared.
Macron’s office also downplayed the situation in a statement. “It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around,” the statement reads. “It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.”
The couple first met when Macron’s wife, then Brigitte Auzière, was teaching at his high school. She had been a drama club supervisor when Macron was a member.
When he moved to Paris during his last year of high school, he promised to marry Brigitte. She eventually moved to the French capital to join him. She divorced her first husband, with whom she shares three children, before marrying Macron in 2007.