Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel is to wed his gay partner on Friday, becoming the first European Union leader to enter into a same-sex marriage, a symbol of growing social change across the continent.
<g data-gr-id="22">Bettel</g>, 42, a centre-right politician who became premier in 2013, will marry Gauthier <g data-gr-id="23">Destenay</g>, a Belgian architect, just months after the conservative Roman Catholic duchy legalised gay weddings.
The low-key ceremony at the town hall in Luxembourg is being deliberately kept out off the media spotlight and will be followed by weekend-long private celebrations for around 500 guests, sources said.
Among those invited <g data-gr-id="19">are</g> Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. As well as being the first leader in the 28-nation EU to wed a gay partner, <g data-gr-id="24">Bettel</g> is only the second in the world after Iceland’s prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, who married her writer partner in 2010.
On the eve of his marriage to <g data-gr-id="20">Destenay</g>, <g data-gr-id="21">Bettel</g> said he had not wanted to hide his sexuality.
“I could have hidden it or repressed it and been unhappy my whole life. I could have had relations with someone of the other sex while having homosexual relations in secret,” he told Belgium’s RTBF public television.
“But I told myself that if you want to be a politician be honest in politics, you have to be honest with yourself and to accept that you are who you are.”