The German national flag
by Riham Alkousaa
BERLIN (Portal) – The German government on Wednesday passed a bill to cut paternity leave benefits for top earners from next year as Berlin faces budget cuts and runaway inflation.
To fit into the Treasury Department’s budget for 2024, the Family Department has proposed halving the annual income ceiling of couples entitled to paternity leave pay to €150,000 (previously €300,000).
The average income per household in Germany is 60,000 euros.
According to the Ministry of Family Affairs, the measure should affect 50,000 parents or 5% of all recipients and save 290 million euros in the next year.
The government intends to impose budget constraints on all departments except the Ministry of Defence.
This measure, along with other austerity measures, is part of the finance bill that the government intends to present by mid-August.
The Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, only has full control over the federal budget in December.
However, the cut in paternity leave benefits has been criticized and seen as a negative signal for gender equality, pushing women, who traditionally earn less than their partners, to be totally dependent on them for the first year of their marriage. Maternity leave and men discouraged from caring for their children at home.
“You can’t break through traditional gender roles like that,” Beate von Miquel, chairwoman of the German Women’s Council, told Portal.
Germany introduced measures in 2007 to increase the birth rate, especially among women with the highest level of education, and offers new parents bonuses of up to 65% of their monthly salary and up to 1,800 euros per month for a period of up to fourteen months.
Dorothee Baer of the conservative opposition party CSU has questioned the Family Ministry’s estimates as an online petition against benefit cuts has garnered more than 390,000 signatures since it was launched on Monday.
“Many will also wonder if they can afford to have a second or more children under such circumstances,” she says.
Paternity benefits and the development of the childcare sector are the main reasons why the birth rate in Germany has risen from 1.3 to 1.5 today, says Martin Bujard from the Federal Institute for Population Research.
“Almost 30% of educated women were childless before this law. Since then, the number has dropped to 25%,” he says.
However, this reduction in allowances should not lead to a spectacular drop in the number of births, since few people are affected by this measure, says Martin Bujard, adding that the difficulties in caring for a child are still the main deterrent for working women.
(Report by Riham Alkousaa; French version Zhifan Liu)