On Wednesday 10 January the centre-right Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said that would have presented soon a bill will be proposed to legalize same-sex marriage, giving them equal rights to heterosexual couples, including the possibility of adopting children. Although the bill has not yet been presented, his statements have created some discontent both within his party, New Democracy, and in the government and in the powerful Greek Orthodox Church.
At the center of the discussions, rather than marriage between same-sex couples, are the implications this would have on parental rights, i.e. the fact that the possibility of these couples raising children is legally recognised. Critics are also concerned that this bill is the first step towards the complete legalization of pregnancy for others (the so-called “surrogate motherhood” or GPA), which in Greece is foreseen in some situations: on this point, however, Mitsotakis has already said to be against.
In general, Mitsotakis said that he proposed the law to regularize the position of Greek children raised by same-sex couples, and who today find themselves in a rather precarious legal situation. Several of these children were in fact adopted by a single parent, given that adoption for single people is provided for by Greek law, or were born abroad through gestation for others, where the laws that allow this practice are less restrictive.
In Greece, pregnancy for others, i.e. when the pregnancy is carried out by a woman on behalf of other people, is permitted only for single women and heterosexual couples, married or unmarried, who cannot have children (due to fertility problems), but it is not for homosexual couples. This does not mean, however, that there are no homosexual couples with children: both because some single women resort to the practice and then raise the children together with their partner, and because some people resort to childbearing for others abroad, in countries where there are no limits established by Greek law, and then return to Greece.
However, these situations create legal problems that directly involve children and that Mitsotakis says he wants to overcome.
For example, in these couples there is always a parent who has no rights over the child he or she is raising, a problem also known in Italy, and this creates difficulties both in everyday life and in the event of death or serious illness of the parent. legally recognized. During an interview on private television Star TV, Mitsotakis said that “same-sex couples have children, and these children will not cease to exist, they will not disappear, but at the moment they do not have the same rights as other children.”
His statements were provocative strong reactions by the Orthodox Church, which still exerts an important influence on state affairs. In fact, in Greece there is a strong bond between State and Church: members of the clergy are considered public officials, and are paid as such. In 2018 the left-wing party then in government, Syriza, he tried to pass a constitutional reform to formalize the separation of roles while maintaining public contributions to the Church, but the project was interrupted when the party lost the elections in 2019. Today many bishops have said they are against Mitsotakis’ proposal; the powerful ultra-conservative bishop of Piraeus, Serafino, who had previously threatened to excommunicate legislators who voted in favor of civil unions, called homosexuality “an abuse of the body” and a “great sin”.
The Holy Synod, the main body of the Orthodox Church, said the law could be the first step towards fully legalizing “surrogacy” and dismantling Greek society, adding that children are “neither pets nor accessories.” . However, Mitsotakis has reiterated several times that he has long thought about and studied the issue of gestation for others and does not want to expand access to it.
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The population’s idea on the topic she is not clear: according to a recent survey for the TV channel Alpha, 49 percent of respondents are against same-sex marriage, while 35 percent are in favor. In a survey for the TV channel LeatheretteOn the other hand, 52 percent of those interviewed expressed a positive opinion on same-sex marriage, but this percentage is lower when considering adoption by same-sex couples.
Strong opposition to the law also came from prominent figures and former ministers who belong to the same centre-right party as Mitsotakis, New Democracy. A sizeable faction of the party led by former prime minister Antonis Samaras has said it will vote against the proposal when it is tabled in parliament. At the moment, fewer than 100 of New Democracy’s 158 MPs could support the law. However, to minimize the impact of this internal debate, the government has said that it will not give any indication of a vote to MPs in its majority, so as to avoid treating the vote on the law as a kind of vote of confidence in the government.
The law could currently pass thanks to the votes of the main left-wing opposition party Syriza, led by Greece’s first openly gay leader, Stefanos Kasselakis.
Kasselakis, who married American partner Tyler McBeth in the United States in October, said he would instruct his 38 lawmakers to vote in favor of the government’s proposal, although a final text has not yet been made public. Kasselakis argues that the ability to have children through gestation for others should be considered an “innate parental right”, but said he was happy that the government was considering taking a step forward on the issue of the rights of LGBT+ couples. These votes, combined with those of New Democracy and other smaller left-wing parties, could exceed the threshold of 151 votes needed to pass the law in the Greek parliament, made up of a single chamber of 300 deputies.
This whole discussion is also creating tensions within Syriza: several party deputies have in fact criticized their leader, accusing him of collaborating too much with the centre-right government. In several they also pointed out that although Mitsotakis has always expressed himself in favor of the rights of LGBT+ couples and was the first head of government to appoint an openly gay minister, five years ago, the choice to propose the legalization of same-sex marriage could be part of a well-studied political maneuver aimed at stealing votes from the centre-left.
In this period, Syriza is in fact going through a profound crisis caused precisely by the election as leader of Kasselakis, a former Goldman Sachs banker accused by historic members of the party of having distorted the left-wing soul of Syriza in favor of “neoliberalism”. The consequence was a split and the departure of dozens of parliamentarians, who joined the New Left, a small party created a few months ago.
A few months before the European elections, Mitsotakis would therefore be at least partly using this bill to gather consensus among the more moderate electors and voters who at the moment do not support the government due above all to its very anti-immigration line. The establishment of same-sex marriage by a centre-right government could weaken the left-wing opposition, which failed to adopt the measure while in government between 2015 and 2019.