Kasselakis: SYRIZA MPs who vote against same-sex marriage bill risk expulsion

The leader of the main opposition, Stefanos Kasselakis, warned on Saturday that SYRIZA lawmakers who vote against a proposed government bill legalizing same-sex marriage risk getting expelled.

“Who in here disagrees with same-sex couples having the right to marry and have children? If there is anyone, stand up,” he told lawmakers at a meeting of SYRIZA’s central committee. “For us, the issues of rights are not a matter of leadership and discipline, they are issues of identity. If not the Left, then who?”

In a post on X (former Twitter) on Friday, he said that it is not conceivable for a left-wing lawmaker to “vote against human rights and progress…If a Member of Parliament deviates from the path of progress and equality, I will take the relevant decisions.”

The comments are seen as a dig at MP Pavlos Polakis who said on Friday that he does not want to vote in favor of the bill. 

Meanwhile, Archbishop Ieronymos, the head of the Orthodox Church of Greece, told Kasselakis on Saturday that he remains “cautious” on the planned government bill.

“If there is a question floating around to which some people want to have an answer, on the issue of same-sex marriage, I would say that I am cautious,” the Archbishop said after a meeting, adding that they agreed with the leader of SYRIZA that “there needs to be a text, a law, to see it” before they comment further.  

Kasselakis, who is openly gay and married his long-time partner in the United States last October, has previously expressed his party’s support for a bill that would extend marital rights to the LGBTQI community.

“For my part, I stated that the values of the Left and SYRIZA are fully consistent with the values of the Church, because what we want to do is to give a voice to the weak. To be able to offer solidarity to all parts of society and especially to those who feel social exclusion,” Kasselakis said. 

“The Church has a big role to play in this course and SYRIZA can certainly stand with its activism on the side of society,” he added.

He also revealed that he raised the issue of the separation of Church and State, which was first discussed between Ieronymos and the former leader of SYRIZA, Alexis Tsipras, when the party was in power in 2018.

He described it as “a good agreement, which unfortunately did not materialize…It will be our intention as the main opposition to continue to promote it and maybe one day as a government to implement it.”