A video has surfaced showing French President Emmanuel Macron purportedly ‘slapped’ by his wife Brigitte Macron as the couple touched down in Vietnam as part of the South East Asia tour.
The footage, which surfaced shortly after the couple landed at Hanoi Airport as part of Macron’s Southeast Asia tour, shows a brief but ‘tense exchange’ as the aircraft door opens. The visual shows Macron’s plane door opening to reveal him and the next moment, his wife Brigitte’s arms emerge from the left of the doorway as she places both hands on her husband’s face and gives it a shove.
While the officials waited at the base of the plane’s stairs to greet the couple, Macron can be seen being pushed away by his wife. She also appears to slap Macron across the face, before they get down the plane in Vietnam.
Macron, who appears visibly startled, quickly regains composure and turns to wave from the aircraft doorway. He then walks toward Brigitte, who is out of the camera’s frame, before changing course and heading in a different direction.
❗️ Macron’s wife viciously SMACKS him in face pic.twitter.com/2zSalRFYLu
— RT (@RT_com) May 26, 2025
The President then reapproaches the plane door and prepares to exit the aircraft and greet the Vietnamese officials.
The couple then proceed down the staircase for the welcome by Vietnamese officials, however, Brigitte does not take her husband’s offered arm.
Though Macron’s office initially denied the authenticity of the video, it later called the incident as a harmless “squabble”.
“It was a moment when the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by joking around,” another close associate of the French President told news agency AFP.
Another source called it a “moment of togetherness,” adding that “no more was needed to feed the mills of the conspiracy theorists.”
The incident during Vietnam visit comes shortly after Macron was the target of online disinformation. Earlier, the President’s office dismissed as “fake news” a viral claim that the French president was using cocaine aboard a train to Kyiv alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
