The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has assured this Monday that the conciliation law he is preparing will eliminate the obligation for fathers to take six weeks of paternity leave immediately after giving birth, as it is currently established. “It is necessary to advance in paternity and maternity leave to make it more extensive and more flexible,” he announced before an Executive Committee weakened by the absence of some men. Feijóo has assured that “families are the ones who best know how to organize their home” and has concluded: “The PP is not going to get involved in how mothers and fathers distribute leave. They will be free to use it during the baby’s first year.”
PP sources have explained to elDiario.es that it will no longer be “obligatory to take the six weeks at the same time after giving birth. Freedom is left in order to encourage them to be consecutive. But they are non-transferable.” Previously, the party had assured that Feijóo was referring to “the fact that it is currently required that the first six weeks must be taken simultaneously by the father and mother, and what the PP proposal seeks is to leave freedom for fathers to organize themselves as they see fit and thus encourage consecutive and not simultaneous leave.”
Feijóo made this announcement in a speech before his National Executive Committee in which he appealed to the “freedom” of choice of parents to end a rule introduced just five years ago. In fact, the PP took to the Constitutional Court the royal decree-law with which the coalition government of the PSOE and Unidos Podemos implemented this system in 2019 in view of the imminent early elections of that year. The court of guarantees rejected the appeal.
The PP vetoed legislation from the Government to increase paternity leave to equal that of mothers, and to make the first six weeks non-transferable, to prevent men from delegating to women, as was previously very common, according to Social Security data. Then, when he saw that he was left alone, he voted in favour and declared himself their number one defender. Later he appealed to the Constitutional Court. And now he wants Congress to eliminate them.
Feijóo wants to introduce this change into the conciliation law that, he said, is being finalised by the Vice-Secretary for Equality, Ana Alós. The leader of the PP has announced that they will meet in “the coming weeks” with “the social and economic stakeholders because nothing should be imposed on those who build this country”.
The leader of the PP has maintained that “being a father or mother cannot be a heroic act” in Spain. “We cannot allow ourselves to have a generation that goes through life with their tongue hanging out because they cannot look after their work and their children,” he said. “We cannot allow conciliation to fall on grandmothers or grandfathers, who deserve all the recognition and affection. This country must roll out the red carpet for those who have the courage to bring a person into the world,” he said.
Feijóo has not anticipated any other measures of this law, except to reiterate an idea that he has already launched on multiple occasions and that he implemented in Galicia: that education from zero to three years old should be free. The PP model is not based on promoting public nursery schools, but on subsidising parents’ private and subsidised centres, regardless of their price.
This is the same model that Juan Manuel Moreno has imposed in Andalusia. The Andalusian Government has ended up renouncing tens of millions of euros of European funds because it was obligatory to allocate them to the public network, and its policy is to subsidise the private one.
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