France's President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday described his "profound but private joy" at the birth of his daughter after visiting his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and the new-born at a Paris clinic. The baby girl was born late on Wednesday, and the president - who missed the birth to attend talks in Germany on the eurozone crisis - dropped in before midnight and then again for 50 minutes on Thursday morning.
He returned to the clinic just afer 5.00pm following a day campaigning. "We have been lucky enough to find great happiness. All the parents here understand our very profound joy, a joy all the deeper because it is private," Sarkozy said during his factory visit in the western Mayenne region.
The first couple had decided not to officially announce the birth, but the president reacted warmly when waste-processing plant workers gave him gifts. "Oh, that's really kind, very thoughtful," he smiled, telling workers who asked after his wife and child: "They're doing really well." Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warmly congratulated Sarkozy. "I wish with all my heart for your baby girl to grow up healthy and happy and to please her parents with her success," Putin wrote.
In less than five years, Sarkozy has become the first president of France's modern Fifth Republic to divorce while in the Elysee, the first to remarry and now the first to have a child. In 2007 when his relationship with his second wife Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz broke down and he quickly took up with the glamorous Carla, voters were turned off by the very public display of his romantic adventures.
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