Aleka Papariga, the KKE and the defense of Marxism-Leninism

By Nikos Mottas

Aleka Papariga, the former long-time leader (1991-2013) of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), celebrates her 80th birthday as a militant whose personal biography has become inseparable from the continuity of a KKE that has refused every form of retreat, compromise, and incorporation into the system of exploitation. Her political life reflects not only the history of the KKE but also its strategic persistence amid some of the most difficult decades for communists worldwide. 

Born in Athens in 1945, she became politically active in her teenage years, joined the KNE during the early years of its rebirth in the 1960s, and was deeply involved in anti-dictatorship resistance, organizing in working-class neighborhoods and among women — a field to which she gave decisive attention for decades to follow. Through the Federation of Greek Women (OGE), she helped articulate a class-oriented line in the women’s movement, rejecting bourgeois feminism and positioning working women at the core of the struggle for social emancipation.

Her election as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece in February 1991, succeeding Charilaos Florakis, is now rightly viewed as a historical turning point for the communist movement in Europe. It was the first time a woman had taken up the leadership of a major European Communist Party — but this was not a symbolic achievement. She assumed responsibility in the midst of an international counterrevolutionary offensive which swept away the USSR and other socialist states and disoriented parties with deep historical roots. 

The 13th Congress of the KKE was conducted under immense pressure, external and internal, to dissolve into the so-called “Coalition of the Left and Progress" (Synaspismos). The narrow election result — a difference of just four votes in her favor — was the expression of a profound clash of orientations. The defeat of the liquidationist line, which soon departed to form Synaspismos, ensured the survival of a revolutionary, independent KKE that did not bend its knee when many others abandoned their titles and flags. In the years that followed, she stood at the center of a collective effort to reverse ideological confusion, rebuild Party organizations in workplaces and sectors, and rescue the KKE from the dangerous illusions of parliamentary “left unity.”

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Papariga represented a voice that openly contradicted the official European consensus. She repeatedly underlined — in the Parliament, at mass rallies, and in international meetings — that participation in the European Union means obedience to capital and imperialism. At times when others treated the EU as “irreversible,” she insisted that real popular gains are incompatible with the structures of monopoly power. Under her leadership, the Party re-elaborated its strategy: the 15th Congress (1996) defined the socialist character of the revolution in Greece, and the 19th Congress (2013) refined the plan for the concentration of forces toward workers’ power, clarifying positions on alliances, the people’s economy, and the role of the Party within the class struggle. These were not academic shifts but fundamental contributions to the strengthening of the Party’s strategic and ideological backbone.

Her parliamentary presence — uninterrupted for over thirty years — was never limited to denunciation. She used the podium to expose NATO crimes in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, to confront Greek governments that dragged the people into imperialist adventures, and to support concrete actions of workers, youth, the unemployed, and immigrants. Even in the most hostile conditions, when the bourgeois media declared communism “finished,” she projected confidence in the historical necessity of socialism and refused every excuse for compromise. Internationally, she elevated the presence of the KKE within the Communist and Workers’ Parties, strengthening bilateral relations, solidarity campaigns, and the reorganization of a movement that desperately needed clear principles after 1991.

During the capitalist crisis of the 2010s, Papariga’s leadership was tested in the most practical way. The pressures on the KKE to participate in a “left government” grew louder, dressed in illusions about “ending austerity” through management of capitalist institutions. She rejected this path categorically, making clear that any government which does not overthrow capitalist ownership will inevitably implement the policies of the monopolies and the EU. That firm “NO” — which many at the time tried to portray as stubbornness — has since been validated entirely. SYRIZA’s administration of memoranda, privatizations, and NATO commitments served as the ultimate proof that no government of the bourgeois state can become a tool of workers’ power. Thanks to this refusal, the KKE preserved its trust with the class it represents and avoided being trapped as a “left prop” of the system.

Aleka Papariga’s contribution has a special weight because it concerns the continuity and future of the Party itself. She did not only defend the revolutionary character of the KKE — she helped reshape it into a modern party of the working class. The strengthening of the KNE, the development of the ideological press, the reorganization of Party forces in production, the systematic ideological struggle against bourgeois and opportunist currents — these bear her imprint along with that of the collective leadership she directed. Even after stepping down as General Secretary in 2013, she remains an active and respected cadre of the Central Committee, continuing to take her place in the struggle, never claiming personal credit, always defending the supremacy of the collective.

Today, cde Papariga represents not a concluded chapter but a living continuity of revolutionary duty. Her work has helped secure the fact that today, the KKE stands as one of the most stable and ideologically clear Communist Parties in Europe — a vanguard that looks toward the future with confidence in the working class and its role as the gravedigger of capitalism. Her legacy is the certainty that even under the most adverse balance of forces, the banner can remain upright — and that fidelity to Marxism-Leninism is not dogmatism but the only realistic compass in the struggle for liberation. 

Papariga’s life and leadership prove that history is made not by those who adapt to the powerful but by those who refuse to retreat when everything around them collapses. For communists in Greece and across the world, her example strengthens the conviction that our time has not passed — our time will come.

* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.