Clip of Macron being whacked hard in the face by his wife is jolting
Élysée Palace has been working overtime lately to defend French President Emanuel Macron from rumors, the latest of which includes a strange moment with his wife.
Video of what appeared to be a shove to the face quickly went viral for its bizarre nature, leaving the French president’s office scrambling to do damage control. As the couple landed in Hanoi, Vietnam and prepared to deplane, video caught a hand pushing Macron’s face forward, toward a waiting press pool. It was enough physical force to send the president backward by a step, prompting many to wonder if the couple had been fighting in the moment.
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The moment spread across social media like a wildfire, but a source from Macron’s presidential office claims that everything is just fine.
“It was a moment when the president and his wife were unwinding one last time before the trip began, playfully teasing each other,” they told CNN. “No more was needed to feed the mills of the conspiracy theorists.”
Macron himself addressed the moment, laughing it off as “joking and teasing” between the couple.Publication
“There’s a video showing me joking and teasing my wife and somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe, with people even coming up with theories to explain it,” he said while speaking to reporters on Monday.
“The videos are all real, and yes, sometimes people tamper with them, but people are attributing all kinds of nonsense to them.”
This comes on the heels of a video that critics claim showed German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Macron trying to hide drugs and paraphernalia while aboard a train to Kyiv. Élysée Palace was quick to step in, claiming the alleged bag of cocaine was actually a crumpled tissue, and that “France’s enemies” were engaging in a “manipulation” campaign to discredit the unifying work Macron is doing.
“When European unity becomes inconvenient, disinformation goes so far as to make a simple tissue look like drugs. This fake news is being spread by France’s enemies, both abroad and at home. We must remain vigilant against manipulation,” the office wrote, adding a higher resolution photo of the object in question.
X users had a lot to say about the video: