French President Macron Downplays Video of Shove from Wife

A video in which French President Emmanuel Macron appears to be shoved in the face by his wife Brigitte on Sunday has gone viral, although Macron claims that he and his wife were joking.

Macron, age 47, is shown in the video standing in front of the plane’s exit doors, when the hands of his wife Brigitte, 72, suddenly emerge from off-screen, pushing his face.

Macron then swivels around to the camera before flashing a smile and waving. He quickly walks out of view.

The video, which is authentic, does not make clear the context of the push. The incident occurred as the couple arrived in Vietnam to begin a tour of Southeast Asia.

Macron downplayed the significance of the shove.

“I was bickering, or rather joking, with my wife,” Macron later told reporters, per a translation. “It’s nothing.”

His office told Reuters that the clip was “a moment of closeness,” and that “it was a moment when the president and his wife were relaxing one last time before the start of the trip by having a laugh.”

Macron is no stranger to viral clips gone wrong. 

Most recently, internet commentators claimed that he was using illegal drugs with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer—falsely asserting that a used tissue seen on a table used by the three leaders was a bag of cocaine.

Macron’s office called these claims “disinformation.”

“There are people who have watched videos and think that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had one-on-one with a Turkish president and that right now I’m having a fight with my wife,” Macron told the press after them most recent incident, per a translation.

“None of that is true, yet those three videos are real.”

Macron has also gotten negative online attention in the past for a 2023 interview in which he secretly removed a luxury watch from his wrist while speaking about economic austerity measures.