Epress.am News from Armenia
France’s first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy gave birth to the first French presidential baby on Wednesday night.
The child, a girl, had been expected for a fortnight, and was born at the La Muette private clinic in the chic 16th arrondissement of Paris, The Guardian reports.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to have flown back from Germany, where he was having urgent talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel about saving the euro, to see his newborn daughter.
According to French reports she was born around 7:30 pm on Wednesday evening. No further details were released. It is the first child to be born to a serving French president.
Europe 1 radio said Bruni-Sarkozy, 43, was doing well after the birth. It is her second child – she has a son from an earlier relationship – while Sarkozy, 57, has three boys from two previous marriages.
Bruni-Sarkozy will also be pleased to finally given birth, given her recent confession that she was bored by pregnancy and anxious to “get it over with” so she could have a drink and a cigarette.
Seven months from a presidential vote in which he is expected to seek re-election, Sarkozy needs a boost to his popularity.
An opinion poll published a few hours before his wife apparently went into labour revealed he was on course for a trouncing next May at the hands of the Socialist party’s newly elected candidate, François Hollande.
However, Bruni-Sarkozy has insisted the baby will be kept out of the spotlight and Stéphane Rozès, a former opinion poll director who now runs the French consultancy agency CAP, says Sarkozy would be advised not to use the child to drum up votes.
“The baby will not play at all in Sarkozy’s favour,” he warned. “The French have a very distinct view about the personal and the political and they don’t like the two to be confused. Sarkozy did this at the beginning of his mandate and it didn’t go down well.”