The political cost of marriage equality

Public discourse in Greece is dominated by the argument that the government’s effort to legislate marriage equality will carry a political cost. Careful analysis of the situation, however, leads to the opposite conclusion.

For a start, Greece is not inventing the cartwheel. Around the world, 36 countries have already legislated marriage equality, 39 have legislated adoption equality, and we can study their experience.

No country has regretted the decision – let alone reversed it. Public debate – no matter how intense ahead of legislation – concludes soon thereafter, as we saw also in this country with same-sex civil partnerships in 2015, and fostering by same-sex couples in 2018; these issues did not feature as electoral issues in 2019. Marriage equality is not a major issue of electoral division for the simple reason that it refers to the rights of minorities, which by definition are the concern of few people, and most do not see this affecting their lives.

The closest example of a conservative party passing such legislation would be that of the United Kingdom’s David Cameron in 2013. Polling published in the conservative press at the time claimed that one in five voters would abandon the Conservative Party if it were to legislate marriage equality. Such a thing never happened. In the elections that followed in 2015, Cameron triumphed with a marginally higher percentage of support, and won more seats than he had in 2010.

International experience shows that support for marriage equality increases steadily after it has been legislated, for the simple reason that the calamity predicted by those opposing it never actually materializes. In the UK, some members of parliament who voted against marriage equality flipped their opinions publicly years later. But even in Greece, MPs who had supported same-sex civil partnerships in 2015 are ministers today, and one of them, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is the prime minister.

Analysis of the far right’s recent rise in Europe is superficial. Acceptance of same-sex marriage in Western European countries has increased to such a degree that right-wing parties, for example in the Netherlands and Sweden, even use marriage equality as an argument against immigrants (“We do not want immigrants because they do not share our values – for example, they do not accept that our homosexual fellow citizens should have equal rights”).

Elections are, of course, won at the center of the political spectrum, as New Democracy proved in the recent elections against SYRIZA. The triangulation strategy has borne fruit.

However, there is also a greater picture which is even more important: If we look at a map of the countries which have legislated marriage equality, we will observe that the difference between the continents of Europe and America versus Asia and Africa is clear. Such are countries that highly value freedom as well as equality under the law. Because ultimately, such values lead to actual, real-life prosperity. These are countries in which many want to live.

We joined the European Economic Community (EEC) as its 10th member in 1981. Shouldn’t we become the 16th European Union member-state to legislate marriage equality? It was not by chance this question was posed to the prime minister during a Bloomberg interview.

Historically, New Democracy has been the party to serve our country’s European vision more than any other; and has, over the years, been rewarded for that by the electorate, surviving even the decade-long financial crisis, as voters know that ND will stand “on the right side of history.” (Conversely, the few times it didn’t do so, it paid a heavy price – for example when it stood against gender equality in the early 1980s.) And this year it celebrates its half century, together with our democracy.

Konstantinos Karamanlis first uttered the phrase, Greece “belongs to the West,” and ensured that the country joined the EEC, against public opinion. ND was the party that kept the country in the euro in the past decade, standing against the sirens of populism.

The adoption of marriage equality serves the national goal of convergence with Europe and that of multidimensional modernization. And it will therefore benefit, not harm, ND, placing it, once again on the right side of history.

Alex Patelis is chief economic adviser to the prime minister of Greece.