The bill was backed by four left-wing parties, including the main opposition Syriza.

“This law doesn’t solve every problem, but it is a beginning,” said Spiros Bibilas, an MP from the small left-wing Passage to Freedom party, who is openly gay.

Three small far-right parties and the Stalinist-rooted Communist Party rejected the draft law from the start of the two-day debate.

“People who have been invisible will finally be made visible around us. And with them, many children [will] finally find their rightful place,” Mitsotakis said ahead of the vote.

“Both parents of same-sex couples do not yet have the same legal opportunities to provide their children with what they need,” he added. “To be able to pick them up from school, to be able to travel, to go to the doctor, or take them to the hospital. ... That is what we are fixing.”

The bill confers full parental rights on married same-sex partners with children. But it precludes gay couples from parenthood through surrogate mothers in Greece – an option currently available to women who can’t have children for health reasons.

Many LGBTQ+ rights advocates have criticised that limitation, as well as the absence of any provision for transgender people.

Psychologist Nancy Papathanasiou, scientific co-director of Orlando LGBT+, which advocates for LGBTQI mental health, echoed that concern but said the new law conferred a very important sense of equality.

“Discrimination is the most pervasive risk factor for mental health,” she said. “So just knowing that there is less discrimination is protective and promotive for LGBTQI mental health.”

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Maria Syrengela, an MP from the governing New Democracy, or ND, said the reform redressed a long-standing injustice for same-sex couples and their children.

“And let’s reflect on what these people have been through, spending so many years in the shadows, entangled in bureaucratic procedures,” she said.

Dissidents among the governing party included former prime minister Antonis Samaras, from ND’s conservative wing.

“Same-sex marriage is not a human right … and it’s not an international obligation for our country,” he told parliament. “Children have a right to have parents from both sexes.”

Polls show that while most Greeks agree to same-sex marriage they also reject extending parenthood through surrogacy to male couples. Same-sex civil partnerships have been allowed in Greece since 2015. But that only conferred legal guardianship to the biological parents of children in those relationships, leaving their partners in a bureaucratic limbo.

The main opposition to the new bill has come from the traditionalist Church of Greece – which also disapproves of heterosexual civil marriage without validation of a Church wedding.

Church officials have centred their criticism on the bill’s implications for traditional family values, and argue that potential legal challenges could lead to a future extension of surrogacy rights to gay couples.

Far-right MP Vassilis Stigas, head of the small Spartans party, described the legislation as “sick” and claimed its adoption would “open the gates of Hell and perversion”.

Politically, the same-sex marriage law is not expected to harm Mitsotakis’ government, which won easy re-election last year after capturing much of the centrist vote.

A stronger challenge comes from ongoing protests by farmers angry at high production costs, and intense opposition from many students to the planned scrapping of a state monopoly on university education.

Nevertheless, parliament is expected to approve the university bill later this month, and opinion polls indicate that most Greeks support it.

AP