Hanoi, Vietnam – The office of French president Emmanuel Macron minimized an incident on Monday in which his wife seemed to push his face upon his arrival in Vietnam to start a tour in Southeast Asia.
The video shot by the Associated Press in Hanoi on Sunday evening shows the opening of the Macron plane door, revealing it. The arms of his wife Brigitte then emerge from the left of the open door, she puts both hands on her husband’s face and gives her a push.
The president seems surprised but recovered quickly and turns to wave through the open door. It remains hidden by the body of the plane, which makes it impossible to see its facial expression or its body language.
Television news AP 
They descend on the staircase of the official reception of Vietnamese officials, although Brigitte Macron does not take the arm offered by her husband.
The video clip circulated quickly online, promoted in particular by accounts usually hostile to the French chief.
Macron’s office initially denied the authenticity of the images, before being confirmed as authentic.
Later, Macron told journalists that he and his wife had just joked.
“We make horses and, really, make up for my wife,” he said, calling for intercourse on the exaggerated incident: “It becomes a kind of geo-planetary disaster.”
A close partner of the president previously described the incident as a harmless “quarrel” of a couple.
Ludovic Marin / AFP / Getty 
Another member of his entourage also played the meaning of the incident.
“It was a time when the president and his wife decompress one last time before the start of the joking trip,” the second source told journalists, including AFP.
“It is a moment of conviviality. It was no longer necessary to feed the mills of conspiracy theorists,” added the source, blaming the pro-Russian accounts for negative comments on the incident.
The macrons were married in 2007, but they met when the president was still in high school and that she was a teacher.
Vietnam is the first stop of a tour of almost a week in Southeast Asia for Macron, where it will present France as a reliable alternative to the United States and China in the midst of economic uncertainty fueled by the two world giants ” current commercial tariff war.
He will also visit Indonesia and Singapore.
