Spotlight : Christofias.

... Dimitris Christofias is a left-wing Cypriot politician who has been elected as the 6th President of the Republic of Cyprus in the second round presidential election held on Feb. 24, 2008. Official figures showed a win of 53.36 percent of the vote to his right-wing opponent Ioannis Kasoulides' 46.64 percent. He occupied the position of President of the House of Representatives of Cyprus, the Cypriot parliament.Christofias was born on Aug 29, 1946 in the village of Dhikomo, Kyrenia. He became involved in leftist politics early in his youth and held several positions with the youth movement of AKEL (the Progressive Party of the Working People of Cyprus). His father, who died in 1987, was a progressive builder, member of the Pancyprian Federation of Labour (PEO).During his secondary-school education at Nicosia Commercial Lyceum, from where he graduated in 1964, he used to work during his summer holidays with his father and thus from an early age he got acquainted with the hardships of the working class.Dimitris Christofias studied at the Institute of Social Sciences and the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow from 1969 to 1974 from which he graduated with a Diploma and a PhD degree in History. In Moscow he met his wife, Elsie Chiratou, whom he married in 1972, and later returned to Cyprus and political life.Dimitris Christofias was elected Member of the House of Representatives for the first time in 1991 and was re-elected in the subsequent parliamentary elections of 1996 and 2001. On June 7, 2001 he was elected President of the House of Representatives and re-elected in 2006. In his function of General Secretary of the CC AKEL and President of the House of Representatives, he was a Member of the National Council, a supreme advisory body to the President of the Republic.The Christofias have three children--two daughters, Marianna and Christina, and a son, Christos. He is a recipient of a living-related kidney transplant, donated by his sister. Christofias will be Cyprus's first communist president and the only one in the 27-member EU albeit. Although proud to be a communist, he says he will leave the free market economy alone. While much of the focus beyond Cyprus has been on Christofias'communist background and education in Moscow, voters on the island have been more concerned with a solution to Europe's longest running conflict, the island's partition since 1974. A*Spotlight : Christofias

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