The new leader of the left-wing opposition in Greece, Stefanos Kasselakis, has broken a taboo in his country, by announcing that he wants children with his partner and wants to use a surrogate mother to do so. The first openly gay politician to head a political party in the country, Stefanos Kasselakis created a surprise at the end of September by being elected head of the left-wing Syriza party, the main opposition party.
A new arrival on the Greek public scene, this 35-year-old businessman, ex-Goldman Sachs trader, presented his American companion, an emergency nurse, to public opinion, defying prejudices in a country where gay marriage does not exist. does not exist and where certain leaders of the Orthodox Church still vilify homosexuals. “We would like to have two boys, Apollo and Ilias (…) thanks to a surrogate mother,” he said on the private channel Alpha TV on Thursday evening. “We must as a society provide complete equality,” he added.
Using a surrogate mother is legal in Greece for heterosexual couples, but not for gay couples. He expressed the hope that his “example” would spark an “awakening of parents, so that they would learn to speak to their children…. and respect their wishes. Then in power under the leadership of former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Syriza opened civil unions to homosexual couples in 2015, but they remain excluded from marriage and adoption as of right. Conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis recently announced his intention to end this discrimination in the coming years.