The French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife Brigitte, at the presidential palace in Hanoi, Vietnam, on May 26, 2025. (Credit: Nhac Nguyen/AFP.)
A moment of "complicity" or slap in the face? Images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron arriving in Vietnam for the start of a Southeast Asia tour have sparked numerous comments on social media.
The images, shot on Sunday night by the American agency Associated Press at Hanoi airport, show the plane door of the president opening, and Emmanuel Macron's silhouette appearing, still inside the aircraft. At that moment, his wife's arms appear, without her being fully visible, and she briskly puts both hands to the president's face in what might resemble a small slap.
Macron seems surprised but quickly turns to salute outside. The presidential couple walks down the stairs, Macron extends his arm to his wife as he usually does, but she does not take it and holds onto the handrail of the gangway. The image spread quickly overnight, notably on several accounts usually hostile to Macron.
The Élysée initially denied the authenticity of the images before they were verified. A close associate of the president then spoke of a trivial dispute between the couple.
"It was a moment when the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip, joking around," eventually commented Macron's entourage to journalists following the tour. "It's a moment of complicity. It didn't take more to fuel conspiracy theorists," they added, attributing the negative comments primarily to pro-Russian spheres.
Claims that National Rally (far-right) deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy on Monday called "Pavlovian lies worthy of banana republics." "Faced with the slightest problem, Macronians accuse 'artificial intelligence' and 'Russian services' before justifying the unjustifiable,’ he said indignantly on X, deeming the Élysée's reaction 'worrisome for our democracy."
Initially silent, the French head of state eventually reacted. "We were joking with my wife as we often do […]. For three weeks, people have watched videos and think I shared a bag of cocaine, had a mano a mano with the Turkish president, and now I'm having a spat with my wife," he said. "None of this is true. Yet, these three videos are real, so everyone needs to calm down and, above all, focus on the core of the news," he explained, according to declarations to journalists cited mainly by the newspaper Le Monde.
In his statement, the French president referred to two other videos. The first, filmed in Kyiv during his recent visit with the German chancellor and the British prime minister to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which internet users believed they saw the heads of state hiding a bag of drugs. And the second, taken during the European Political Community summit in Tirana, where the French president and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan exchanged a rather unusual handshake: the Turkish president seized several of Macron’s fingers before only keeping his middle finger in hand.
The French president was beginning a tour of about a week in Southeast Asia in Hanoi. He will also visit Indonesia and Singapore.