While his wife, Carla Bruni, recovers after giving birth to their first child in a private Paris clinic, President Sarkozy is unlikely to take his statutory paternity lpleeave or slow down his working life.

"/> While his wife, Carla Bruni, recovers after giving birth to their first child in a private Paris clinic, President Sarkozy is unlikely to take his statutory paternity lpleeave or slow down his working life.

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CARLA BRUNI

Sarkozy ‘unlikely’ to take paternity leave

While his wife, Carla Bruni, recovers after giving birth to their first child in a private Paris clinic, President Sarkozy is unlikely to take his statutory paternity lpleeave or slow down his working life.

Published: 20 October 2011 08:52 CEST

New fathers in France are allowed eleven days of paternity leave by law, increasing to 18 days for multiple births.

During the recent elections to choose a Socialist nominee for the 2012 presidential elections, one of the candidates, Ségolène Royal, proposed giving Sarkozy “paternity leave of five years.”

It is unlikely the president will take any days off. He has a packed agenda over the coming days and weeks. On Wednesday, he left his wife in the La Muette clinic and flew to Frankfurt to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss a deal to save the euro.

He will also attend a summit on Sunday in Brussels which is planned to adopt a comprehensive deal to solve the ongoing sovereign debt crisis.

His reluctance to take the time off may not be only due to a busy schedule, but also a macho political culture in France.

According to sociologist Christine Castelain-Meunier, quoted in Thursday’s Parisien newspaper, the reluctance to take paternity leave is common in the political classes.

“Since it was created in 2002, no French male politician of any note has publicly taken his paternity leave,” she said. “Perhaps some have taken it but not wanted to be blacklisted for it.”

Senior politicians in other countries have been more willing to take their allotted leave. Prime Minister David Cameron took two weeks of paternity leave when his wife, Samantha, gave birth in 2010, as did his rival, opposition leader Ed Milliband.

In Norway, the minister of children, equality and social cohesion took a full sixteen weeks of paternity leave.

Franck Louvrier, one of the president’s advisers, told the newspaper that time off was highly unlikely.

“There is one person who is exempt from parental leave and that’s the head of state,” he said.

Other new fathers in France are more willing to take advantage of the time off with two-thirds taking full paternity leave.

Employers’ union, Medef, has called for parternity leave to become obligatory.

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Spain could raise parental leave to six months for both mothers and fathers

Photo: David Straight/Unsplash

Spain’s Minister of Social Rights Ione Belarra announced on Wednesday that her department intends to extend parental leave for fathers and mothers to 24 weeks, equal to six months for each parent.

“This Ministry is going to fight for extending permits to six months and to extend child education from 0 to 3 years in the public network of infant schools,” Belarra said at a conference on Spain’s upcoming Family Diversity Law, which the six-month parental leave would form part of.

According to Belarra, who has taken over from Pablo Iglesias as the head of the hard-left party Unidas Podemos, the Spanish government has “unfinished business with the families of newborn babies”.

“I’m aware of how incredibly difficult it is for many families to find a balance between parenting and work, especially in the first years of their child’s life”, she said, and “how difficult it is for many mothers to leave four-month-old babies with other people to go back to their jobs”.

Spain increased its paternity leave for fathers to 16 weeks in January 2021, equalling the leave mothers get, both of which are remunerated at 100 percent of their regulatory base salary.

The country has also come a long way in terms of parental leave, as in 2006 new dads were still only given two days off to be with their newborns.

READ MORE: New fathers in Spain can now enjoy 16 weeks paternity leave

But according to Belarra (pictured below), the current amount of parental leave is still causing “difficulties” when raising babies, in the country with the second lowest birth rate in the EU.

(Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO / AFP)

According to ministerial sources, the fact that a concrete amount of parental leave has been put forward as part of the Family Diversity draft law should facilitate negotiations with the socialist PSOE party that Unidas Podemos forms a government coalition with.

Belarra is also pushing for child benefits for parents as a means of encouraging couples who are not having children “for financial reasons” or because “they don’t have a suitable home or stable job”.

The child benefit should be available even to those who don’t make social security contributions, who as things stand can’t access government parenting aid, the Social Rights Minister added.

“This family diversity law goes to the root of the problem, to protect the material living conditions of families and to make it a little easier to raise kids.

“It cannot be that the fourth economy of the EU allocates almost one point less of its GDP to support their families than the average.

“In Spain, having children severely increases the risk of being poor,” the minister concluded.

A total of 22,182 fewer babies were born in Spain in 2020, with the latest fertility index showing that the average number of children per woman in the country is only 1.18.

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