London: As French president Nicolas Sarkozy seeks a pan-European initiative on the global financial meltdown, his glamorous wife Carla Bruni risks a European split with attack on the Italian Prime Minister for a suntan "joke" on US president-elect, Barack Obama.
The 40-year-old pop singer courted controversy by flaying Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi for his remarks on Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and white American mother.
Italian-born Bruni, who has taken French citizenship after her marriage to the Sarkozy last February, singled out Berlusconi's joke in which he made a remark about Obama as "young, handsome and even tanned". The pop singer-wife of Sarkozy said she was happy to be French.
"When I hear Silvio Berlusconi ... joke about the fact that Obama is always tanned, that makes me feel funny," she told le Journal du Dimanche newspaper. "That will be put down to humour. But often, I am very happy that I have become French," she said.
Bruni risked embarrassing her husband as he seeks Berlusconis backing for a pan-European initiative to rescue the global economy from the financial meltdown, the Times newspaper said on Monday.
According to the British daily, the French first lady also created a row with her outspoken support for a petition in favour of affirmative action in her adopted country following the ascendancy of Obama as the first Black president of the US. She delivered an outspoken attack on Frances failure to integrate its big population of black and north African immigrants.
"Power (in France) has often had the same face: that of men who are white and aging, Bruni said. That is why I can identify with this appeal. Without political measures we will be waiting too long," she stressed.
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