With a wave of his hand, French president Emmanuel Macron has taken a different tack to diffuse the controversy over his wife appearing to hit him, this time by making light of it.
On Monday, cameras caught the moment Brigitte Macron pushed her husband in the face as their plane arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the start of their South-East Asian tour. The French leader, who was standing in the doorway of the plane, looked momentarily stunned after the then-unidentified hand hit him in the face.
But after playing down headlines of the pair appearing to have been caught in the middle of a heated argument, the French president on Tuesday instead made fun of it.
After touching down in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, for the second leg of their tour, an unidentified hand was seen waving to the cameras from the same side of the doorway of the presidential plane from which Brigitte had seemingly hit Macron in Hanoi. Mr Macron then appeared in the doorway and walked down the stairs arm-in-arm with his wife.
A close friend of the couple told Radio France that they had staged the video to mock the fallout from the previous video, nicknamed “le slap” in the media.
“They wanted to respond with self-mockery,” the source said.
Macron initially dismissed the incident from Hanoi as a joke between the couple, but he later expressed frustration that the video had “become some kind of planetary catastrophe”.
At the time, he cautioned that this was not the first time in recent weeks that the content of videos of him had been twisted by people he described as “crackpots”.
Earlier this month, Russian social media channels seized on a video of Macron hiding a tissue, suggesting the French leader was attempting to conceal a bag of cocaine.
Macron was sitting in a train carriage on the way into Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, alongside Keir Starmer and German chancellor Friedrich Merz, when the footage was taken.
The Russian channels also claimed that a coffee stirrer clutched by Merz was a cocaine spoon.
Those ridiculous claims were endorsed by high-level Russian officials, including the Kremlin’s foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova.
Paris openly mocked the claims in a social media post. It carried two photos depicting the tissue in question and a photo of Mr Macron shaking hands with Sir Keir. “This is a tissue for blowing your nose,” the caption for the first photo read. “This is European unity to build peace,” read the second.
