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'Love Wins Again' as Greece Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called the legalization—a first by a Christian Orthodox nation—"a milestone for human rights."
Feb 15, 2024
Greece on Thursday became the first Christian Orthodox, 16th European Union, and 37th overall nation to legalize same-sex marriage, a move one rights group called "a huge step forward for LGBTQ+ people" in the Balkan country.
Members of the Hellenic Parliament from across most of the political spectrum came together in a rare moment of consensus, defying opposition from the country's influential Orthodox Church and voting 176-76 with two abstentions to pass the landmark reform.
In addition to granting same-sex couples marriage rights, the measure also opens the door to adoptions and confers parental guardianship rights to both parents in same-sex partnerships.
"Greece is proud to become the 16th E.U. country to legislate marriage equality," Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece's center-right prime minister, said on social media after the vote. Mitsotakis had promised to approve marriage equality legislation after his reelection last year.
"This is a milestone for human rights, reflecting today's Greece—a progressive, and democratic country, passionately committed to European values," he added, drawing some scornful replies highlighting the nation's treatment of asylum-seeking migrants.
During Thursday's parliamentary debate, Mitsotakis said that "people who have been invisible will finally be made visible around us, and with them, many children will finally find their rightful place."
Stella Belia, the head of same-sex parents' group Rainbow Families, toldReuters that Thursday's vote was a "historic moment" on a "day of joy."
"It makes life much, much easier for many people, and it protects children that have been living in a state of precariousness," Belia said in a separate interview with The New York Times.
Historian Nikos Nikolaidis said the vote marked "a very important step for human rights, a very important step for equality, and a very important step for Greek society."
Meanwhile, Archbishop Ieronymos, who heads the Greek Orthodox Church, said legalization will "corrupt the homeland's social cohesion," a position shared by the far-right Elliniki Lysi party.
Outside the Hellenic Parliament in Athens, proponents of marriage equality celebrated the vote.
"I'm very proud as a Greek citizen because Greece is actually—now—one of the most progressive countries," Ermina Papadima, a member of the Greek Transgender Support Association, told Reuters.
"I think the mindset is going to change," Papadima added. "We have to wait, but I think the laws are going to help with that."
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Rights Groups Demand Justice for Migrant Shipwreck Off Greek Coast
"The Greek authorities' response to the Pylos tragedy is a crucial test of their willingness to investigate human rights violations against racialized people on the move," said one researcher at Amnesty International.
Dec 14, 2023
Six months after a boat carrying 750 migrants and asylum-seekers capsized off the coast of Pylos, Greece, two international human rights organizations said Thursday that Greek authorities have failed to deliver justice and get to the bottom of how the shipwreck happened.
The boat sank on June 14, killing more than 600 people.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) interviewed 21 of the 104 survivors as well as five relatives of victims who have not yet been found, representatives of the Hellenic Coast Guard, and international aid groups—and determined that Greek authorities failed to mobilize "appropriate resources for a rescue" as they "ignored or redirected" offers of help from the European Union as the boat approached Greece.
The fishing trawler was "severely overcrowded" with men, women, and children traveling from countries including Syria, Egypt, and Pakistan, when it set sail from Libya in June.
The boat was reportedly bound for Italy, but entered the Hellenic Coast Guard's search-and-rescue region in the Mediterranean Sea several days after leaving Libya. The marine authority was alerted to the Adriana's presence about 15 hours before it sank, but Amnesty and HRW found in its interviews that despite learning that the boat was in possible danger of sinking, the Coast Guard did not take action to avert disaster.
"At several points, the Coast Guard received information about conditions on the boat that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch believe should have been interpreted as indicators of distress as set out in E.U. law and that trigger the duty to rescue under E.U. and international law of the sea," reads the groups' report. "At 12:47 EEST, [E.U. border agency] Frontex told the Greek authorities that the boat was heavily overcrowded and no one was wearing life jackets."
An activist who was in touch with people on the boat also reported on social media that at least six people had died aboard the Adriana, and the captain of another nearby tanker told the Hellenic Coast Guard the fishing trawler was "rocking dangerously."
But the groups found that the Coast Guard sent a rescue vessel equipped with just 43 life jackets, eight life preserver rings, two inflatable life boats with room for 39 people, and one auxiliary inflatable raft—supplies that would have left hundreds of people on the boat without any way of getting to safety if they'd been used.
Frontex confirmed to the two groups that it twice offered aerial support to the Greek authorities, and that its calls went unanswered.
Eleven of the survivors told Amnesty and HRW that the Coast Guard "attached a rope to the Adriana and accelerated, causing the boat to veer in various directions before capsizing."
A survivor named Gamal told the groups that as the Greek boat approached the Adriana, he was sitting on the roof.
"I was so excited, I wanted to see those people who came to rescue us," he said. "When they tied the rope... they pushed our boat to the left very fast... They go left, the boat sinks left, then they go right, the ship sinks more on the right."
Greek officials have denied making a failed rescue attempt, and have claimed that people aboard the Adriana "rejected assistance"—an allegation which, if true, "does not relieve competent authorities on the scene of their duty to protect lives at sea."
The groups' report comes weeks after official investigations were opened by the Greek ombudsman, the European ombudsman, and Frontex's fundamental rights officer. Greece began its probe due to the Coast Guard's "refusal to conduct an internal disciplinary investigation," said Amnesty. Only 13 survivors have been summoned to make statements to the Naval Court, which opened its own investigation in June.
"Greece must ensure that survivors and families' of the hundreds who lost their lives can safely and effectively participate in proceedings to the highest degree possible and ensure that investigations are carried out in a timely manner, guaranteeing the completeness and integrity of evidence admitted," said Adriana Tidona, migration researcher at Amnesty International.
Amnesty pointed out that there have been "historic failures in Greece's investigations of shipwrecks involving people on the move," including in its probe of the sinking of a boat near Farmakonisi in 2014, in which 11 people were killed. The European Court of Human Rights condemned Greek authorities for "the shortcomings in its rescue efforts and in its subsequent investigations" into that disaster.
"Almost 10 years since the deadly Farmakonisi shipwreck," said Tidona, "the Greek authorities' response to the Pylos tragedy is a crucial test of their willingness to investigate human rights violations against racialized people on the move at the country's border."
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Endgame for Syriza? The Unbearable Lightness of the Greek Left
Perhaps those who voted for Kasselakis are unfamiliar with U.S. politics and the true color of the Democratic Party, but it is a vision that undoubtedly sends shivers down the spine of the members of the old guard.
Sep 26, 2023
The Third Way is a political term that gained currency in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is associated with the New Labour administration of Tony Blair, who served as UK’s prime minister from 1997 to 2007, but also with those of Bill Clinton in the US (1993-2001) and Gerhard Schroder in Germany (1998-2005), respectively. The term itself was developed by British sociologist Anthony Giddens and denotes a distinct political ideology that argues in favor of so-called “centrist” politics.
Essentially, Third Way proposals seek to reconcile right-wing and left-wing policies. More specifically, the “Third Way” aims to integrate center-right economic policies and center-left social policies. As such, the “Third Way” is really nothing short of a political stratagem whose underlying goal is to maintain the hegemony of capitalism by making the system sensitive to cultural and social sensibilities. Disregarding the left flank, embracing the “catch-all” thesis, and loosening the influence of labor in the economy and society at large while promoting at the same time the politics of multiculturalism define the politics and strategy of social-democratic parties that became part of the "Third Way" movement.
Make no mistake, Syriza is entering a new era with Kasselakis in charge of the party.
Indeed, by the late 1990s, virtually all the social-democratic parties in advanced capitalist societies had fallen prey to the fatal attraction of the Third Way mentality while the traditional values and beliefs of the old Left joined the dustbin of history. The only country in the western world with a radical leftwing party that did not fight for power on the ground laid by the Third Way was Greece.
Until very recently, that is.
Part of the explanation for the “delay” of Greek leftwing parties in adopting the approach of the "Third Way" is that social democracy was never established in Greece. Throughout the 20th century, the bulk of the country’s left had aligned with a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, named KKE, but a major split occurred in 1968 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. A big group broke from the KKE, forming KKE Interior, which eventually came to identify itself with Eurocommunism, a political movement that flourished in the late 1970s in several western European communist parties and sought to introduce socialism beyond the political and ideological orbit of Soviet communism.
The Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) traces its roots to the KKE Interior, although Eurocommunism disappeared as an international current shortly after its birth and, for all practical intents and purposes, the Syriza party that rose to power in Greece in 2015 was a political organization that had no discernible ideological traits whatsoever other than an expressed aversion to the fiscal austerity measures that had been imposed on the country by its international creditors -- namely, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – as a condition to the bailout deals that had been crafted in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
However, while in power, Syriza experienced a huge metamorphosis. The dilemma of choosing between resistance and capitulation was resolved in favor of the latter. Syriza had promised voters it would ditch austerity and in fact rip to pieces the bailout memorandum. In turn, it not only continued to enforce the same austerity program that had been implemented by the previous Greek governments but ended up signing a third bailout memorandum.
Moreover, even before coming to power, Syriza had initiated a series of moves that aimed to reshape the party’s political profile in congruence with the trends observed in those western social democratic parties that had adopted the "Third Way" proposals. The process of Syriza’s transformation into a mainstream party continued unabated both when the “left” was in power (from 2015-2019) and back in opposition (2019-2023). Yet, while it was abundantly clear that the party, under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras and his inner team, was bent on abandoning its tradition of radical politics and that a prominent left faction inside Syriza was too weak to halt that process, it wasn’t at all clear where the party’s base stood.
The answer to that mystery was revealed during the leadership election that was held just this past Sunday when party members elected a gay, liberal, former Goldman Sachs trader, shipping investor, and political neophyte Stefanos Kasselakis to head the once radical left-wing Syriza party.
Tsipras had stepped down as Syriza chief following his party’s humiliating defeat in the June 2023 general elections. Given the party’s dwindling public support, Tsipras’ resignation was inevitable, but the question why Syriza members (though it should be said that some 40,000 were registered as members on the spot) decided to place the future of the party into the hands of someone who was light on policy and heavy on social media marketing during his campaign speaks volumes about the political processes that had been unleashed by Tsipras and his inner circle over the past 9 years or so.
Kasselakis, with no experience in politics and no leftist credentials, but with the blessing of Tsipras himself and his closest associates, beat former Minister of Labor Effi Achtsioglou in a runoff election, sending shockwaves throughout the Greek left.
The ideal scenario for Syriza’s future that its new leader has envisioned is that it becomes the mirror image of the Democratic Party in the United States. Perhaps those who voted for Kasselakis are unfamiliar with U.S. politics and the true color of the Democratic Party, but it is a vision that undoubtedly sends shivers down the spine of the members of the old guard inside Syriza for they surely know that this is a recipe for the complete disappearance of the Left from the Greek political scene.
Most likely, then, what lies ahead for the party are divisions and conflict, rather than unity and peace. Eventually, an actual, formal split of the Syriza party also cannot be ruled out. Indeed, senior Syriza cadre and former education minister Nikos Filis said in a TV interview the other day that Kasselakis is “a cross between Beppe Grillo [an Italian comedian and co-founder of Italy’s Five Star Movement political party] and Trump.” In the same interview, Filis also blamed Tsipras for Syriza’s demise. And Effie Achtsioglou has already turned down every party post offered to her by Syriza’s new leader.
Make no mistake, Syriza is entering a new era with Kasselakis in charge of the party. Under Tsipras, Syriza abandoned any pretext of being a radical leftwing party. Under Kasselakis, Syriza will cease having affinity to leftist politics in any form or shape, which means that Greece will now be left with a Leninist-Stalinist Communist Party as the only large-scale organized political force fighting for the interest of the working class.
Oh, the unbearable lightness of the Greek left.
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