EMMANUEL Macron and his wife Brigitte have put on a united front for the world’s cameras a day after the shocking face slap drama.
Viral footage that has overshadowed the start of the couple’s Southeast Asia tour shows the French leader’s wife shoving him in the mouth and jaw after landing in Vietnam.
Furious Macron attempted to downplay the incident last night by claiming the pair were “squabbling and, rather joking”.
He added that the unbelievable incident has been overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe”.
The French leader also argued that the clip and viral reaction to it offered a cautionary tale about disinformation in the social media age.
Today, Macron and the First Lady were captured arm-in-arm after arriving at Hanoi’s University of Science and Technology for the French president to make a speech.
The couple were pictured together a few hours after Macron claimed “crackpot” conspiracy theorists were trying to heighten speculation on what their marriage might look like behind closed doors.
Footage of the shove was initially denied by Macron’s office as being an AI-generated fake – but were forced to retract their statement and admit it was genuine.
His office said: “It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around.
“It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.”
The unbelievable moment captured at Hanoi airport showed Macron facing his wife – who is out of the frame – as the plane’s doors opened.
Despite Brigitte not being visible, her arms are soon seen raised as she shoves a stern-looking Macron in the face.
Appearing shocked, the French leader immediately notices the doors open and quickly turns to wave at the sea of cameras at the bottom of the plane steps.
Despite Macron’s attempts to defuse claims that they weren’t in a heated argument, the couple’s body language immediately after the push seems to suggest otherwise.
Brigitte and Macron emerge together from the aircraft and walk down the staircase, with the French leader extending his arm to his wife.
But she takes hold of the handrail of the walkway for support instead, potentially due to an explosive argument they could have had inside.
The French leader has repeatedly been targeted by conspiracy theories and deepfakes.
He previously had to deny “false and fabricated” rumours his wife was born a man, dubbing the transgender claims as being typified misogynistic online attacks on women.
And recently he blasted a fake Russian claim that he had a bag of cocaine on the table when he was pictured on his way to Kyiv with Keir Starmer and Germany’s Friedrich Merz.
Drawing comparison with the shove video and the cocaine tissue claim, Macron said in Vietnam last night: “For three weeks, there have been people who have watched videos and who think that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had a mano-a-mano with a Turkish president and now that I am having a domestic dispute with my wife.
“In these three videos, I took a tissue, shook someone’s hand and just joked with my wife, as we do quite often. Nothing more.
“None of this is true. So everyone needs to calm down.”
The politician was just 15 when he started a relationship with the then mother-of-three, his French literature teacher.
Macron is in Hanoi to begin a week-long tour of Southeast Asia, where he will also visit Indonesia and Singapore.
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/14330698/macron-brigitte-united-front-slap-drama/