Meet the handsome Greek politician who could become the country's first gay prime minister [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

Contrary to some American gays’ beliefs, Greece isn’t exactly a magical land where people drop everything to sing and dance along to ABBA songs at a moment’s notice.

In fact, the country—governed by conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis since 2019—has been besot with its fair share of economic and social woes of late, and it still doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage.

So, it came as a shock when, over the weekend, gay entrepreneur Stefanos Kasselakis was elected as the leader of Greece’s left-leaning opposition party, Syriza, becoming the first openly LGBTQ+ individual to hold the position in the organization’s history.

Even more unprecedented is the fact that, at 35, Kasselakis is relatively young and inexperienced, a former businessman labeled as a “political outsider.” International news outlets like The Guardian have heralded his out-of-nowhere victory as “stunning,” while Al Jazeera reports that some see it “as a breath of fresh air for a [struggling] party.”



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