French President’s Face Hit By First Lady; Questions Raised Over Domestic Violence
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
HANOI (Worthy News) – French President Emmanuel Macron has denied his marriage with his former high school teacher faces a crisis after an apparent violent altercation with France’s First Lady was captured on camera following their arrival in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.
First Lady Brigitte Macron could be seen shoving the face of her husband moments before they left the presidential plane.
President Macron appeared briefly startled but quickly recovered when realizing that the boarding gate had opened and there was a camera pointed at him.
He smiled and raised his right arm to quickly wave at the camera, his other hand clutching a handle beside the gateway.
Brigitte Macron’s body was not visible, and her husband told reporters afterward the gesture was “playful” after his office initially blamed the pictures on fake news.
He 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.”
PLAYING JOKES?
Another Elysée source said the couple was “decompressing one last time before the start of the visit, larking around.” Macron “loves playing jokes on his wife before official occasions, and she always responds like this … It wasn’t even a slap.”
Yet Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova seized on the footage, writing on the social media platform 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 miscalculate her strength?” she wondered on social media.
“Did she want to fix his collar but ended up reaching the beloved face?” Zakharova asked 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,’” she added.
CONSERVATIVES CONCERNED
Conservative commentators expressed their doubt about Macron’s version of events, suggesting he might be a victim of domestic violence. If it were him hitting her, it would raise calls for his resignation, they suggested.
“Macron is the ultimate leftie hero. So the feminists have been strangely quiet on this one,” noted Sharri Markson, a host of broadcaster Sky News Australia.
“They [feminists] are always quick to talk about domestic violence, but not in this instance, it seems,” she told her television audience.
“Because apparently domestic violence just goes one way: men hitting women. If it is the reverse, it is fake news. It is Russian disinformation. It is a conspiracy theory,” Markson observed.
“They just showed their togetherness,” she quoted feminists saying about the incident. In Markson’s dictionary, it’s called: “hypocrisy.”
A French government report showed that security forces recorded some 271,000 victims of domestic violence in 2023, with women making up the vast majority of cases. This figure marked a doubling of reported incidents since 2016.
MASSIVE DEALS
Yet after the brief incident involving France’s first couple, the Macrons disembarked the aircraft with the First Lady ignoring her husband’s arm to help her walk down the plane’s stairs.
“They met when he was just 15 and she was a married mother of three, she was 39 years old … she was one of his high school teachers,” Markson recalled. “Their marriage [which began in 2007] is being examined through a different light after this footage emerged.”
Despite the distraction, France and Vietnam signed deals worth about $10.2 billion on French Airbus planes, defense, and other pacts.
The deals with Vietnam have come amid heightened trade turmoil since U.S. President Donald J. Trump imposed tariffs on countries worldwide.
Officials said the agreements cover the purchase of 20 Airbus planes, cooperation on nuclear energy, defense, rail and maritime transport, satellites, and vaccines.
The Macrons’ trip to Vietnam marked the first formal visit by a French presidential couple to the country’s former colony in nearly a decade.
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