The door of a plane carrying the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had just been opened by staff members in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday when two hands reached out and pushed Macron smack in the face.
He looked stunned at first. Then he looked up at a camera filming the scene from outside and waved.
The video spread quickly. The hands belonged to the French first lady, Brigitte Macron.
On Monday, Emmanuel Macron said the video had captured him and his wife “bickering and rather, joking around”, something, he said, “we often do”.
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“I’m surprised by it; it turns into some kind of global catastrophe where people are even coming up with theories to explain it,” he said. “It’s nonsense.”
Macron, whose arrival in Vietnam marked the start of a five-day state trip to Southeast Asia, said it was the latest in a string of disinformation put out by “crazy people” targeting him in recent weeks. The footage was real, he said, but the interpretations were fake.
Two weeks ago, Macron travelled with the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on a train. A video of them showed a tissue lying on a table in their cabin, and some social media accounts described it as a “bag of cocaine.”
The Élysée Palace, the president’s office, put out a rare social media post at the time, stating: “When European unity becomes inconvenient, disinformation goes so far as to make a simple tissue look like drugs. This fake news is being spread by France’s enemies, both abroad and at home. We must remain vigilant against manipulation.”
Macron also cited a video of his lingering handshake with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at a meeting in Tirana, Albania, as another example of disinformation.
“It’s been three weeks — if you look at the international agenda of the president of the French Republic, from Kyiv to Tirana to Hanoi, there are people who have watched the videos and believe that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had a ‘mano a mano’ with a Turkish president and that right now I’m having a fight with my wife. None of this is true,” he told reporters Monday.
“So everyone needs to calm down and focus on the real news.”
Still, the video lit up conservative talk show channels across France.
Ivan Rioufol, a right-wing political columnist, said the video clip implied “there may be domestic violence against men”.
The incident on the plane suggested there was an imbalance in the relationship between Macron and his wife, Rioufol told the Europe 1 television channel. Macron “cannot even command respect from his wife when there are cameras in front of him,” Rioufol said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
