For its February cover story Delano sits down with Étienne Schneider, who has just marked his first year as economy and trade minister. In comments exclusively for Delano’s online edition, Schneider said that he does not try hard to make time for his private life: “As long as I’m single, there’s no sense. Except that you lose a little bit of your friends. I think my really good friends understand that due to my job it’s quite difficult to meet.”

“The problem is that weekends are never relaxing if you know that you’ll have to give a speech or you have an official dinner or lunch or whatsoever. Or you’re just traveling. Most of the time if I travel abroad, I will have to leave Luxembourg on Saturdays or the latest on Sundays, in order to get started Monday morning wherever you go to. So these weekends are gone, because you’re just traveling. You pass your time in airports. That’s not really fun.”

Seven days a week

Even at home he often will give a speech on a Saturday afternoon and attend an event on Saturday evening and then again on Sunday.

“So the weekend is gone. Even though you know that Sunday stuff is for two hours, whatever you do before that event, you cannot relax because you know that you’ll have to go there and do the speech, and think about ‘what am I going to tell them’, and so on.”

Schneider told Delano that “I’m not blaming anybody” for taking on jam-packed schedule, and he knows that fellow cabinet members manage to make time for family life.

On Thursday the minister talked about his campaign to save jobs at Luxguard in Dudelange, and on Wednesday he outlined the perception of Luxembourg he often encounters abroad.

More on Schneider’s first year in office and his plans for the rest of his term can be found in the February print edition of Delano, released Thursday.