Eighty-eight. Perhaps the best way to understand why the family bill now before the Council is far more than a simple reform of parental leave and subsidies is to start with this number. It is the count of children born in San Marino between January and August 2026. In the same period of 2025, there were 106. Eighteen more.
Small numbers in absolute terms, as is inevitable in a Republic of just over 30,000 inhabitants, but precisely for that reason they carry enormous weight. Because when a community is small, every empty cradle weighs heavier.
It is probably from this angle that the reform now heading to final approval by the Grand and General Council (Consiglio Grande e Generale) should be read. Not simply as a law “for the family,” but as an attempt to grapple with one of the hardest challenges San Marino will face in the coming decades.
Falling birth rates, after all, cannot be tackled by simply telling young people to have more children. That would be too easy. The real question is another one: how many young people today feel they have the economic, professional and personal conditions to start a family?
It is on this ground that politics must play its hand.
The bill attempts to do so by putting concrete measures on the table. Paternity leave rises from 10 to 20 days, fully paid and usable even on a fractional basis. The biggest change concerns parental leave: for the first three months, the allowance rises to 80% of net pay, with a minimum of €1,500 a month; it then drops to 40%, with a minimum of €1,000, until the child’s first birthday, before falling to 20%, with a minimum of €500, until the child turns 18 months old.
These are not mere technical details. The point is to make economically viable what is already, on paper, a right: being able to stay home with a child without seriously straining the family budget.
There is also another part of the reform that deserves attention and that significantly broadens the scope: recognition of the family caregiver. That is, of those who devote a significant part of their lives to caring for a relative who is not self-sufficient, is ill, or has a disability.
This is a reality often lived almost entirely within the walls of one’s home, yet one that generates enormous value for society as a whole. The bill introduces different levels of recognition based on the caregiving burden, financial support, notional pension contributions and, in the most demanding situations, the option of unpaid leave from work for up to five years, renewable for another five. Training and tools designed to prevent isolation and burnout are also included.
It is perhaps here that the bill takes on its most interesting meaning. Family does not mean only the birth of a child. It means care — of a newborn, of an elderly parent, of a vulnerable person. And above all it means time, a resource that very often clashes with work and with the need to bring home a wage.
Of course, it would be a mistake to burden this law with impossible expectations.
No reform can decree a couple into having a child. And no benefit payment, on its own, can reverse a demographic curve affecting virtually all of Europe.
Behind the choice to have children — or not — lie housing costs, wages, job stability, childcare services, working hours, career prospects, and even how young people perceive their own future. In short, it comes down to confidence in tomorrow.
And this is probably the next challenge for San Marino.
The bill now before the Council can build a stronger safety net around those who choose to become parents and those who care for a family member. But it will need to fit within a much broader policy, one capable of asking how easy it truly is today for a twenty- or thirty-year-old to imagine building a future life on Mount Titano.
One figure contained in the report accompanying the reform hints at just how deeply felt this issue is: thousands of people took part in the survey on demographic trends promoted through the Statistics Office, with 2,100 completed questionnaires. That is no small number. It means the problem is being felt, and that a substantial part of the population wants to talk about it.
Now the ball is in politics’ court.
And perhaps, on an issue like this, the usual divide between majority and opposition matters less than usual. Figures, tools, funding and individual provisions can and should be debated. But the problem behind them belongs to everyone.
Because 88 births are not simply a statistic to file away in a table.
They are 88 new citizens. And behind those numbers lie others that are missing.
A Republic can keep its accounts in order, grow economically and build new opportunities. But if it progressively stops having children, sooner or later it will have to face a far simpler, and far more uncomfortable, question: who will San Marino be in twenty or thirty years?
The law now before the Council cannot provide that answer on its own.
But it can be a first piece of the answer. And, above all, it can force the country to start asking itself the question in earnest.
