Claim: Social media users are linking a false narrative to a video that has gone viral. The video features a young boy and a lady dancing. It is being claimed that the video is 30 years old, and the characters are France President and his wife when they were younger.
Verdict: False. The dancers in the video are neither France President Emmanuel Macron nor his wife, Brigitte Macron. The video is a performance at the ‘So You Think You Can Day’ reality show in 2016.
Full Text
A video of two dancers, a young boy and a lady dancer, has gone viral on the internet, with social media users claiming that the two are France President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron.
“This is a 30-year-old television clip. This video is interesting not only because of the dance sequence, but because this young boy is the current president of France and the lady dancer, then his teacher, is his current wife,” some of the users sharing the video have asserted.
Some of these can be found here, here, here, and here.
This is not the first time this video has surfaced. We found a 2019 post on Facebook here, and a user said the performance was 23 years old. The user made a similar claim – that the video featured France President Emmanuel Macron whilst he was younger and the lady dancer to be his wife.
Verification
A Google reverse image search was done to identify other instances when the same image was used.
We found a more extended version of the video, which had been uploaded on Youtube in September 2017. We observed that minutes 0:17 to 1:40 had the same scenes as can be seen in the viral video.
At minute 1:26 of the longer video, a zoomed-out shot, we could see the words “So You Think You Can Dance. The Next Generation” appear on a screen in the auditorium.
“So You Think You Can Dance” is an American reality television dance competition show that airs on Fox in the United States. The show, which has 17 seasons, began to air in 2005.
Evidently, the video has not existed for 30 years, as suggested.
Again, the song used by the two dancers during their performance, ‘Toca Toca – Radio Edit’, was released in 2014. The main version of the song was released in 2013.
An image from the performance can also be found in the image collection of Getty Images. They indicated that the photo was created on July 11, 2016. The caption further gave the name of the duo as Jake Monreal and Jenna Johnson.
We also found another video on Youtube that featured the two dancers. The video was uploaded by the same channel that posted the more extended version of the video that had gone viral.
Conclusion
The video is not related to France President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, in any way. The two dancers have been identified as Jake Monreal and Jenna Johnson. They performed at the ‘So You Think You Can Day’ reality show in 2016.
