“We proudly support Antti Kaikkonen’s decision,” Annika Saarikko, finance minister and leader of the Center Party, said on Thursday.
Kaikkonen will be absent from January 6 until the end of February next year. “Children are only small for a very short time, and I don’t want to remember that just in pictures,” he wrote on Twitter. The defense minister announced the birth of his second child in July. MP Mikko Savola will take over in his absence.
In Finland, fathers whose children were born before September 2022 are entitled to 54 days of paternity leave. According to the government, about 80 percent of Finnish fathers use this, but only part of the whole day.
While several politicians have already taken parental leave in government positions, Kaikkonen is one of the first men in Finland’s ministerial post to take it. The pioneer was then Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen, who twice took a few days of parental leave during his term in office in the late 1990s.
After the Russian attack on Ukraine, Sweden and Finland broke with their decades-long tradition of military alliance neutrality and applied for NATO membership in May. Each of the 30 NATO member states must ratify accession. Only Hungary and Turkey have yet to agree.
(SDA)