French first lady Brigitte Macron appeared to push her husband away with both hands on his face just before they disembarked from their plane to start a tour of Southeast Asia this weekend. President Emmanuel Macron dismissed the gesture — caught on camera — as just horseplay, but it caused a stir back home.
French media on Monday tried to decipher the interaction that cameras spotted through the just-opened door of the plane. The headline of a story on the website of the daily Le Parisien newspaper asked: “Slap or ‘squabble’? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment.”
Macron later told reporters that the couple — married since 2007 after meeting at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher — were simply joking around.
“We are horsing around and, really, joking with my wife,” he said, adding that the incident was being overblown: “It becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
His office earlier offered a similar explanation.
“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,” his office said.
Source: AP