Oh dear. It seems there’s trouble in one couple’s Parisian paradise after French president Emmanuel Macron was caught on camera being shoved in the face by his wife Brigitte as the pair landed in Vietnam. The footage spread furiously across social media – with the Elysée Palace initially denying the images were real before eventually admitting that they were indeed authentic. Talk about a tête-a-tête, eh?
The video, captured by the Associated Press news agency in Hanoi on Sunday evening, revealed the president standing at the door of the plane as it opened. Out of nowhere, his wife’s arms flew at him as Brigitte pushed her husband in the face – with Macron looking rather unsurprisingly irritated in the aftermath. After the Palace accepted the images were genuine, a close associate of the French leader brushed the incident off as a couple’s harmless ‘squabble’ – while another member of the president’s entourage played the whole thing down further – insisting it was a ‘moment of togetherness’. If that’s what they call it these days…
And Macron himself has been forced to comment on the rather bizarre clip, telling reporters in Vietnam that there was no ‘domestic dispute’ before complaining this was the latest attempt by ‘crazy people’ to smear him. ‘We are horsing around and joking with my wife and I am surprised by this,’ he lamented.
It’s not the only video that has set conspiracy theorists off recently – after the Elysée Palace was forced to deny earlier this month that Macron had brought, er, cocaine onto a train destined for Kyiv for a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky. ‘For three weeks,’ Macron complained, ‘there have been people who have watched videos and think that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had a one-on-one with a Turkish president and that now I’m having a domestic dispute with my wife. None of this is true.’ That may be the case – but living a life in the limelight is just one of the perils that come with a high-profile gig like the presidency. C’est la vie!
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