1st Gay Couple Set for Marriage After Greece’s Historic Vote

Just hours after Greece’s historic parliamentary vote legalizing same sex marriage, a gay couple in Athens announced—as required for all marriages under Greek law—their plan to marry to the daily Ta Nea.

The couple contacted the municipality of Nea Smyrni in Athens a week prior to the date of the parliamentary vote, asking for the necessary documents, Constantinos Anagnostopoulos, vice mayor in charge of civil marriages in the municipality told state tv.

“From here on, we’ll follow the ministry’s guidelines, to go ahead and run the first wedding,” said the vice mayor. The wedding will most likely take place after the law has been published in the Government Gazette and after the issuance of possible ministerial decisions that will clarify the procedures.

Legal permission for same sex couples to get married is the culmination of decades of campaigning for equal rights by the LGBTQ+ community and many others. MPs also approved a bill that will allow same sex couples to adopt children, making Greece one of the first Orthodox Christian countries to permit this.

The same sex marriage bill was passed with the support of 176 MPs from both sides of the political spectrum, with the new law, which will take a few days to become official, being celebrated in the streets of Athens by dozens of people. However, it saw opposition from the Orthodox Church and many right-wing politicians.

After the vote was passed, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis took to social media platform X, posting: “The vote has passed: as of tonight, Greece is proud to become the 16th EU country to legislate marriage equality.”

He added that “this is a milestone for human rights, reflecting today’s Greece—a progressive, and democratic country, passionately committed to European values.”

The lead up to Greece’s same sex marriage vote

Mitsotakis, who personally spearheaded the bill, had urged lawmakers to “boldly abolish a serious inequality” in Greek democracy that had rendered same-sex families “invisible.”

The reform would “significantly improve the lives of quite a few of our fellow citizens, without taking away anything from the lives of the many,” he added.

The bill, “Equality in civil marriage, amendment of the Civil Code and Other Provisions,” implements the constitutional principle of freedom and the constitutional principle of equality, Parliament’s Scientific Service said in its report on the bill, which went to the plenary for discussion on Wednesday.

In the previous days, during the processing of the draft law in the committees of the Parliament, the rapporteurs of ruling New Democracy, the main opposition SYRIZA, and the opposition parties PASOK, New Left, and Course of Freedom (Greek: Plefsis Eleftherias) were in favor of the bill in principle.