Watch | Did Emmanuel Macron get shoved in the face by wife Brigitte? His ‘horsing around’ reply

‘Geo-planetary catastrophe’

According to Macron, there was no mid-air domestic dispute or awkward fallout — just a bit of marital playfighting.

“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” Macron said on Monday while speaking to reporters in Hanoi, Vietnam. “Somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe,” he added, clearly amused by the attention. “Everyone needs to calm down.”

The short but meme-worthy moment got viral as the French presidential couple landed in Vietnam to kick off a Southeast Asia tour. Brigitte, clad in a bright red jacket, wasn’t immediately visible when the plane door opened — until her hands suddenly appeared, pushing her husband’s face in what many thought was a sign of tension. Macron’s brief look of surprise before switching to a smile added to the intrigue.

French media wasted no time in weighing in. As per a report by Associated Press, Le Parisien wondered in a headline: “Slap or squabble?” while social media lit up with hot takes and even accusations of a diplomatic incident in the making. Some suggested the couple had fought, while others labeled the moment a “snub” — especially since Brigitte declined to take Macron’s arm as they descended the stairs.

The Élysée Palace initially downplayed the moment and later clarified: this was just a light-hearted exchange. “It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around,” said a source close to the presidency, as reported by AP, calling it a moment of “complicity.”

Still, Macron used the incident to make a broader point about life in the age of hyper-viral content. “The videos are all real,” he said, “but people are attributing all kinds of nonsense to them.”