Greece's conservative New Democracy party won a landslide victory in Sunday elections, handing its leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis a second term as prime minister.

New Democracy's win in Greece's second election in five weeks inflicted a stinging defeat on their main rivals, the left-wing Syriza party.

Near complete results show New Democracy has won just over 40.5% of the vote while the Syriza, was struggling to reach 18% -- 2 percentage points lower than the last elections in May.

"With today's electoral result, Greece opens a new, historic chapter in its course," Mitsotakis said in a televised statement. Voters, he said, "gave us a strong mandate to move faster on the course of the big changes our country needs. In a loud and mature way they have permanently closed a traumatic cycle of lies and toxicity that held the country back and divided society."

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Sunday's vote was held under an electoral system that grants a bonus of between 25 and 50 seats to the winning party, depending on its performance, which makes it easier for a party to win more than the required 151 seats in the 300-member parliament to form a government.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said this week that Italy intends to set an example in aiding persecuted Christians around the world, insisting that "religious freedom is not a second-class right."

Meloni's statement came the day after a United Nations "expert" declared that when religious liberty clashes with LGBT rights, religious liberty must yield.

Freedom of religion or belief is compatible with equality for LGBT persons, Victor Madrigal-Borloz asserted in his June 21 address to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, as long as religious groups embrace the claims of homosexual and transgender persons.

Religious narratives that clash with the beliefs and lifestyle choices of LGBT persons, however, are "beyond the scope of the right freedom of religion or belief," Madrigal-Borloz said.

In her videotaped statement, Meloni insisted that the opposite is true.

"One point is very clear," she said. "Religious freedom is not a second-class right; it is not a freedom that comes after others or can even be set aside for the benefit of new, so-called freedoms or rights."

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Italy's first female prime minister stated:

Religious liberty is a natural right and precedes every juridical formulation because it is written in the heart of man. It is a right proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but still today it is trodden underfoot in too many nations in the world, too often in the face of almost total indifference.