First Ladies and Spouses of the World (PHOTOS)

Who are the most beautiful, and most powerful, first ladies and spouses of the world? See the photos and details below and decide for yourself which first lady is the most impressive!

Everyone knows Michelle Obama, who has dazzled everyone with her smooth fashion sense and her work fighting childhood obesity in America. And of course we all know Carla Bruni, the wife of the French president who turns heads around the world.

For pics of some of the other top first ladies in Europe and elsewhere, with their varying interests and fashion sense, see below.

First Ladies and Spouses of the World (PHOTOS)
newsweek

France's scene-stealing new First Lady made a spectacular foray into geopolitics last month with her controversial role in the liberation of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor from a Libyan prison. Her actual influence in ending the eight-year ordeal remains ambiguous: "She was lucky," Saif al-Islam Qadhafi, the Libyan leader's son, told NEWSWEEK. Lucky or not, after two trips to Libya and a long conversation with the man who was once the most roguish of state leaders in his Bedouin tent, the mythmaking had begun.Three months in "office," Cécilia, 49, had set herself apart from her predecessors in France and from the current crop of European First Spouses, who steer clear of public affairs.

First Ladies and Spouses of the World (PHOTOS)