FRENCH couples waiting to adopt Vietnamese children are protesting that one of the country’s top entertainers was given help from the president’s wife in adopting a child in Hanoi, writes Matthew Campbell.

Johnny Hallyday, the 61- year-old rocker, and his wife Laeticia, 29, adopted a Vietnamese baby girl in record time after a state visit to Hanoi in October by President Jacques Chirac.

Bernadette, Chirac’s wife, presented to the Vietnamese minister of justice a list of dozens of French families who were hoping to adopt. She was quoted as asking the minister: “Do you know our friends Johnny and Laeticia Hallyday?” Hallyday, who has raised money for charities championed by Bernadette Chirac, is a national icon in France, even if the rest of the world is largely ignorant of his talent.

The Vietnamese minister blinked. “He sings,” she explained, adding that the Hallydays had tried in vain for a baby and wanted to adopt a girl.

A few weeks later their wish was granted. The Hallydays have since been photographed in magazines with Jade, their new daughter. They denied that they had been treated differently from anybody else.

That is not how Phung Cuong Tin saw it. He runs a Paris-based charity that arranges adoptions. “It is a huge scandal,” he said, adding that the average wait for a Vietnamese child was three years.

“When there are thousands of families queueing to adopt a child in Vietnam, why should these people (the Hallydays) be given priority? This is a clear case of favouritism.”

Christian and Annick Roux have been waiting for four years to adopt a four-year-old girl in Cambodia. They complained to Chirac last week about the Hallydays jumping the queue. “Bernadette Chirac helped Johnny Hallyday and Laeticia to adopt a child in Vietnam. Why not us?” said their letter to the Elysée Palace.

Christian Roux has begun a hunger strike in protest. He seemed no less qualified to adopt than Hallyday, already a grandfather through children from other relationships.

The singer, who likes to leap on stage in tight leather trousers and a cloud of artificial fog, has always seemed happy to satisfy curiosity about a dalliance with drugs, a suicide attempt in 1966 and a colourful love life that has included five marriages — two of them to the same woman — and numerous affairs.

Last week he acknowledged that the couple had been helped by Bernadette Chirac: “If her action allowed us, perhaps, to go a bit quicker, a lot of anonymous families also benefited from her stepping on the accelerator.”

This does not satisfy Charles and Cécile, a childless couple, both aged 40, who had applied to adopt a Vietnamese baby in 2001 and are still waiting.

“What shocks me,” said Phung, “is how blatant it was: right under the noses of people who have been waiting for years. If powerful people do such things, couldn’t they at least keep quiet about it?”

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