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Olympic-Sized Lie: Macron Booing Video Aired by Belarusian and Russian Media Fact-Checked
The WTF team has already debunked a similar fake about the French President.
President of France Emmanuel Macron was met by a crowd with boos during the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics on 11 August 2024. This news was reported by several Russian and Belarusian media outlets, which also showed a video of the incident. The Weekly Top Fake team investigated when the footage was grabbed.
Due to the non-telecast of the 2024 Olympic Games on Belarusian and Russian television channels, viewers in these countries had to follow the events online. The Telegram channel “Shkvarka News” posted a video on August 12th, 2024, purportedly showed a fragment of the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, where spectators in the stands booed as Emmanuel Macron approached the microphone.
However, the stands captured in the video are marked as “Rugby World Cup France 2023”. The Rugby World Cup did take place in France in 2023, and Emmanuel Macron was jeered by fans at Stade de France when he walked onto the field at the opening ceremony. This was how people expressed their disagreement with the unpopular pension reform, he had proposed, gradually increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64 years by 2030. It recently has come into force, leading to social tensions and causing mass protests throughout France.
This video has nothing to do with the 2024 Olympic Games.
The WTF team has already debunked a similar fake about the French President. At the end of February 2024, Belarusian pro-government Telegram channels published a photograph of Emmanuel Macron running, allegedly fleeing from farmers who stormed the building where an agricultural exhibition was taking place. Read more.
