Emmanuel Macron has denied he and his wife, Brigitte, had an altercation after a viral video promoted by Russian state media and French far-right accounts appeared to show her pushing him in the face as they prepared to get off a plane in Vietnam.
The video, shot by an Associated Press camera operator, shows the French president appearing in the doorway of the plane at the start of a visit to Hanoi. His wife’s hand appears to shove him, causing him to step back before recovering and waving.
Brigitte Macron’s body is not visible and her husband told reporters afterwards the gesture was playful. But the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, seized on the footage, writing on Telegram that the president had received “a right hook”.
“Did the first lady decide to cheer up her husband with a gentle pat on the cheek and miscalculated her strength?” she asked in a mocking post. “Did she want to fix his collar but ended up reaching the beloved face?” Zakharova added, after the Russia Today TV channel and associated social media accounts had repeatedly aired the clip. “Here’s a hint: maybe it was the ‘hand of the Kremlin’.”
Macron told reporters in Hanoi he and his wife were “joking around, as we do quite often”. An Élysée Palace official told French media the scene showed “a moment of closeness. But that was enough to feed the conspiracy theorists.”
Another Elysée source said the couple were “decompressing one last time before the start of the visit, larking around”. Macron “loves playing jokes like on his wife before official occasions, and she always responds like this … It wasn’t even a slap.”
The Macrons take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi on Monday. Photograph: Jeanne Accorsini/SIPA/Shutterstock
Macron noted that other videos of him had been misinterpreted. People “have thought I shared a bag of cocaine, tussled with the Turkish president, now that I’m having a domestic dispute with my wife … None of this is true. Everyone needs to calm down,” he said.
Zakharova and the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones this month wrongly accused Macron, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, of using drugs on a train to Kyiv, claiming a crumpled tissue was a bag of cocaine.
Macron told reporters in Hanoi the internet accounts making the claims were “familiar”, allying Russians with French extremists, adding that commentators had “explained this morning that my diplomacy was that of a battered husband”.
France and Vietnam on Monday signed deals on Airbus planes, defence and other pacts worth €9bn (£7.55bn) as the Macrons embarked on the first formal visit by a French presidential couple to the country’s former colony in nearly a decade.
The deals with Vietnam come amid trade turmoil prompted by Donald Trump’s US tariffs and cover the purchase of 20 Airbus planes, cooperation on nuclear energy, defence, rail and maritime transport, satellites and vaccines.
