The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has denied that he and his wife, Brigitte Macron, had an altercation after a viral video seemed to show it pushing it in the face when they arrived in Vietnam.
The footage, captured by an Associated Press camera operator, shows Macron at the door of a plane during his arrival in Hanoi.
While the president pauses to greet, a hand, presumed to be Brigitte Macron, appears to push his face, which makes him go back momentarily.
While Brigitte's body is not visible in the frame, Macron told reporters that the gesture was playful. “We were joking, as we do quite frequently,” he said in Hanoi.
Despite this explanation, the Russian state media and the extreme right commentators quickly seized the clip. Maria Zakharova, spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made fun of the images on Telegram, wrote: “Did the first lady decided to encourage her husband with a soft pat on the cheek and misunderstood her strength? Did she want to fix her neck but ended up reaching her beloved face?”
He added sarcastically: “Here is a clue: maybe it was the” hand of the Kremlin. “
The Russian radio station and its social media accounts repeatedly transmitted the video, feeding the speculation.
An Elysée Palace official told the French media that the scene showed “a moment of closeness. But that was enough to feed the conspiracy theorists.”
Another source close to the presidential couple said the moment was cheerful. “They decompressed for the last time before the beginning of the visit, leaving.
Macron loves playing jokes as in his wife before official occasions, and she always responds like this … she wasn't even slapped. “
Later, the Macrons participated in a crowns of crowning placement in the mausoleo Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi.
Macron, who has faced wrong information campaigns before, said his frequency.
“People have thought that they shared a cocaine bag, which fought with the Turkish president, now that I am having a domestic dispute with my wife … none of this is true. They all need to calm down,” he told journalists.
Earlier this month, Zakharova and the theoretician of the American conspiracy Alex Jones falsely accused Macron, the German chancellor Friedrich Merz and the British prime minister Keir Starmer to use drugs on a train to kyiv, claiming that a cross -failed was evidence.
Macron said the accounts behind these statements were “family”, linking Russian actors with extreme French extreme extremists. “The commentators explained this morning that my diplomacy was that of a mistreated husband,” he added.
Meanwhile, France and Vietnam signed agreements worth 9 billion on Monday. The agreements cover airbus aircraft, nuclear energy, defense, rail and sea transport, satellites and vaccines.
This visit is the first official trip of a French presidential couple to Vietnam in almost a decade.
(The Guardian)
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