Koutsoumbas at Perama shipyards: Voting for KKE will crush Golden Dawn's popularity

The working class has borne the brunt of the capitalist crisis, said Dimitris Koutsoumbas, secretary general of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), during his visit at the Perama shipyards, Piraeus area on Friday.

Koutsoumbas said it is the workers who still have the most problems, "not the elites, the oligarchs, the rich, whose earnings went up even during the crisis while the working class kept losing."

He then mentioned that labor accidents have increased in recent years, from 5,000 in 2014 to over 7,000 today, and attributed the rise to the worsening of working conditions nationwide, while he criticised the abolition of the fire station in the Perama industrial zone, and the lack of an on-site fire-extinguishing vehicle to prevent loss of life during fires.

Concerning the upcoming European, regional and local government elections, the communist leader said that voters should not follow the "lesser evil" mentality, because this brought SYRIZA and "the hundreds of unpopular austerity laws it passed," along with "keeping in effect all the previous austerity measures."

Another point Koutsoumbas made concerned the rise of the far-right, for which the antidote he said was a stronger, re-enforced communist party, "to fight not only against the anti-popular policies of all who have ruled thus far, but it will also bring down the (Golden Dawn) murderous Nazi-sympathiser gang from its third-popular-party position."

The KKE leader will visit the party's main electoral stand at the pedestrian walkway in Peristeri (33 Ethnikis Antistaseos Str.), midday Saturday. On Sunday, he will cast his vote at the 2nd High School in Nea Ionia, at 10:00 a.m.