Macron cites horseplay as wife appears to push the French leader

French first lady Brigitte Macron appeared to push her husband away with both hands on his face just before they disembarked a plane to start a tour of south-east Asia this weekend.

President Emmanuel Macron dismissed the gesture – caught on camera – as just horseplay, but it has caused a stir back in France.

French media tried to decipher the interaction that cameras spotted through the just-opened door of the plane.

The headline of a story on the website of the daily Le Parisien newspaper asked: “Slap or ‘squabble’? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment.”

Mr Macron later told reporters that the couple – married since 2007 after meeting at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher – were simply joking around.

“We are horsing around and, really, joking with my wife,” he said, adding that the incident was being overblown: “It becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”

His office earlier offered a similar explanation.

“It was a moment where the President and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” his office said.

The video – taken as the Macrons arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday – showed a uniformed man pulling open the plane door and revealing the President standing inside, dressed in a suit and talking to someone who was not visible.

Two arms – in red sleeves – reached out and pushed Mr Macron away, with one hand covering his mouth and part of his nose while the other was on his jawbone. The French leader recoiled, turning his head away.

Then, apparently realising that he was on camera, he broke into a smile and gave a little wave.

In subsequent images, Mr Macron and his wife, wearing a red jacket, appeared at the top of the stairs.

He offered an arm but she did not take it. They walked down the carpeted stairs side by side.

Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auziere, a married mother of three children, when they met at Mr Macron’s high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Emmanuel Macron, a literature lover, was a member.

He moved to Paris for his last year of high school, but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to join him and divorced before they finally married.