French media on Monday tried to decipher the interaction that cameras spotted through the just-opened door of the plane as the couple disembarked in Hanoi Sunday for the start of a tour of Southeast Asia.

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.”

"Un moment de complicité" entre Emmanuel et Brigitte #Macron.

L'Élysée a voulu désamorcer la polémique après que des images très relayées sur les réseaux sociaux ont montré le président français recevoir une main au visage de la part de son épouse pic.twitter.com/l4eCTzaS2G

— FRANCE 24 Français (@France24_fr) May 26, 2025

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.”

He added that other videos had been misinterpreted, like ones purportedly showing him sharing a bag of cocaine or confronting the Turkish president. “None of these are true,” he said, and “everyone needs to calm down”.

Conspiracy theory?

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.

The video showed a uniformed man pulling open the plane door and revealing the president standing inside, dressed in a suit and talking to someone who was not visible.

Two arms — in red sleeves — reached out and pushed Macron away, with one hand covering his mouth and part of his nose while the other was on his jawbone. The French leader recoiled, turning his head away. Then, apparently realising that he was on camera, he broke into a smile and gave a little wave.

In subsequent images, Macron and his wife, wearing a red jacket, appeared at the top of the stairs. He offered an arm but she did not take it. They walked down the carpeted stairs side by side.

Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children, when they met at his high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Emmanuel Macron, a literature lover, was a member.

He moved to Paris for his last year of high school, but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to join him and divorced before they finally married.