Spain’s future queen, Princess Letizia, gave birth on Monday to her first child, a girl, lending urgency to a debate on changing the constitution to give women the same right as men to inherit the throne.

The Royal Palace announced just after 2:30 a.m. that Letizia, wife of Crown Prince Felipe of Borbon, had given birth to a girl, six hours after she was admitted to Madrid’s Ruber International clinic. “Their royal highnesses ... have the great pleasure to announce that their first daughter was born today in Madrid,” a statement from the Palace, read on state radio, said. The baby, named Leonor, is second in line to the Spanish throne after Felipe and is the seventh grandchild of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. A crowd of photographers, television crews and well-wishers waited outside the clinic for hours under pouring rain for news of the royal birth.

The birth comes 17 months after the glittering wedding of Felipe, now 37, and Letizia, a glamorous former television news reader now aged 33. The birth of a girl lends urgency to proposals by Spain’s 18-month-old Socialist government to reform the constitution to give male and female members of the royal family equal rights in succeeding to the throne. As things now stand, men take precedence over women in the line of succession, so if Felipe and Letizia later had a boy, he would be next in line to the throne, displacing Leonor.

Complex reform

Reforming the constitution is not easy however. It would need the support of two-thirds of members of both houses of parliament and then parliament would be dissolved and new elections called. The new parliament would again have to approve the reform by a two-thirds majority and then it would be put to a referendum. Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopez has backed leaving the constitutional reform until near the end of the current legislature, in 2007. The government has said the proposed constitutional reform would apply to the next generation, that is to Leonor, and not to Felipe, who himself has two elder sisters.

The May 2004 wedding of Felipe to Letizia, a divorcee, symbolised a new dawn for the country just over two months after the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people. Spain’s current king, Juan Carlos, ascended the throne following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. He enjoys great respect in Spain because of his role in defusing an attempted right-wing military coup attempt in February 1981 and rescuing the country’s nascent democracy.

His heir, Felipe, nearly two metres (6 ft 7 ins) tall, grew up in Madrid in the final years of Franco’s rule. He was educated in Spain, Canada and the United States, trained in Spain’s Army, Navy and Air Force and sailed for Spain at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Letizia, daughter of a journalist and a nurse turned union leader, held a series of television jobs before becoming a household name as a television news presenter.

Adrian CROFT