New head for Greek communist party after 22 years

Greece's anti-European communist party, the KKE, elected a new leader replacing veteran female politician Aleka Papariga after her 22-year continuous run, the party announced Sunday. "The new central committee has elected Dimitris Koutsoumbas as general secretary of the KKE committee," the party said in a statement. The 68-year-old Papariga, daughter of communists who resisted Nazi occupation during World War II, is the only woman in Greece to have headed a party for so long. First elected to parliament in 1993, Papariga has been a member of KKE -- a party adhering to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine -- since 1968. Founded in 1918, KKE remains one of the most rigid communist parties, reflecting the dogmatism of the former Soviet Union before perestroika. Papariga followed closely the policy of her predecessors and resisted any modernisation in KKE, despite the changes that other communist parties adopted in Europe. The new general secretary, 52-year-old Koutsoumbas, became a party member in 1974. He has been director of KKE's newspaper Rizospastis and head of the party's international relations department. In a recent speech reproduced on Sunday on the site of newspaper Naftemporiki, Koutsoumbas spoke against KKE collaborating with other parties of the left. The party promotes an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-American and anti-European stance, which has become stronger since the beginning of Greece's debt crisis in 2010. Greek communists want Greece to be "released" from the EU and oppose the "barbaric" measures imposed by the country's creditors, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. While traditionally the third-largest party in the Greek parliament for many years, KKE became the smallest when it recorded only 4.5 percent of the vote at the elections in June 2012.