Government > Leaders Stats: compare key data on Greece & Italy

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STAT	Greece	Italy	HISTORY
Head of state > Term limit for head of state	5 Ranked 80th.	7 Ranked 8th. 40% more than Greece
President	Karolos Papoulias	Giorgio Napolitano
President > Profile	<p>Born in 1929, veteran Pan Hellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) foreign minister Karolos Papoulias was elected president by parliament in 2004, and again for a final five-year term in 2010.</p> <p>The presidency is a largely ceremonial post, as executive power resides with the prime minister, but Greece&#039;s debt crisis has thrust President Papoulias into the political foreground as he tries to maintain a stable government in the face of public anger and a divided political class.</p>	<p>Giorgio Napolitano was re-elected as president of Italy in April 2013 - the first time in the history of the Italian republic that an incumbent president had been voted in to serve a second term.</p> <p>The 87-years-old Mr Napolitano had previously signalled that he was keen to retire and had ruled himself out as a candidate, but after five rounds of voting failed to elect a new president, he was prevailed upon to stand as a consensus candidate in the sixth round.</p> <p>In that ballot, he secured 738 votes out of a possible total of 1,007 that could be cast by the combined chambers of parliament.</p> <p>Mr Napolitano&#039;s re-election came in the wake of an inconclusive parliamentary election in February 2013 that gave rise to protracted negotiations over the formation of a new government.</p> <p>During this period, the president came to be seen as a guarantor of stability. However, those pushing for change and a radical shake-up of the old political class saw Mr Napolitano&#039;s re-election as a further sign of political stagnation.</p> <p>Giorgio Napolitano began his first term of office in May 2006, when he was sworn in as Italy&#039;s 11th post-war president.</p> <p>The former member of the Italian Communist Party was among the leading architects of the party&#039;s transformation into a social-democratic movement.</p> <p>The Italian president heads the armed forces and has powers to veto legislation, disband parliament and call elections.</p> <p>For most of his first term, Mr Napolitano preferred to remain distant from the often treacherous world of Italian parliamentary politics, and so when he did intervene directly - as happened in November 2011, when he issued a not-so-coded message to the political class to examine its conscience and acknowledge collective responsibility for the crisis facing the country - his words carried considerable weight.</p>
President > Summary	President Karolos Papoulias	President Giorgio Napolitano has been a stabilising influence on Italian political life
Prime Minister	Antonis Samaras	Enrico Letta (resigned)
Prime Minister > Profile	<p>The leader of the conservative New Democracy party since 2009, veteran politician Antonis Samaras formed a coalition government in June 2012 committed to pushing through the austerity package required to secure European Union and IMF funds. </p> <p>His party won a relative majority at the May general election, but was unable to rally enough support among other parties. A second election in June boosted New Democracy enough to ensure that, in alliance with the Socialist Pasok party and the small Democratic Left, Mr Samaras could become prime minister.</p> <p>A US-educated economist from a prominent family, Mr Samaras has been a highly contentious figure in New Democracy. </p> <p>He entered parliament in 1977 and became first finance and then foreign minister under Konstantinos Mitsotakis in 1989. </p> <p>His hard line over newly-independent Macedonia&#039;s use of that name led to his dismissal the following year, and he formed his own short-lived rightwing party. This split New Democracy and brought down the government in 1993.</p> <p>As the fortunes of his breakaway party waned, Mr Samaras made overtures to New Democracy and rejoined in 2004, become a European MP and then returning to the Greek parliament in 2007. </p> <p>He won the party leadership five years later, and burnished his divisive reputation by expelling rival Dora Bakogiannis in 2010 over her support for the Pasok government&#039;s first EU-IMF bailout deal.</p> <p>With Greece facing bankruptcy he agreed to support the second bailout and the 2011-2012 governments of national unity, and made his peace with Ms Bakogiannis after the May 2012 election.</p> <p>Mr Samaras won in June 2012 on a programme of softening some of the terms of the austerity package, such as restoring some pension cuts and directing bailout money to job creation projects. </p> <p>His government has to a certain extent stabilised the fiscal crisis by pushing through many of the austerity measures required as the price of international bailouts, despite substantial public opposition to spending cuts.</p> <p>However, the need to impose deeply unpopular measures exacerbated tensions between Mr Samaras and his coalition partners, and in June 2013 Democratic Left exited the government following the breakdown of talks over the future of the state broadcaster ERT. The departure of Democratic Left reduced the governing coalition&#039;s parliamentary majority to just three.</p>	<p>After less than a year in the job, Enrico Letta resigned as prime minister in February 2014, after his Democratic Party (PD) voted in favour of an urgent change of government to push through reforms. </p> <p>President Giorgio Napolitano then asked PD leader and mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, to form a new government.</p> <p>Mr Letta was named prime minister in April 2013 after inconclusive elections at a time when Italy was mired in recession. </p> <p>He forged a coalition with former premier Silvio Berlusconi&#039;s conservatives - an unusual alliance of bitter rivals - as well as centrists led by former prime minister Mario Monti.</p> <p>The creation of the coalition at first appeared to pave the way for yet another political comeback for Mr Berlusconi, who was forced to resign in 2011 as Italy slid deeper into the eurozone&#039;s sovereign debt crisis. </p> <p>Mr Letta&#039;s appointment of a protege of Mr Berlusconi, Angelino Alfano, as his deputy initially raised suspicions that the scandal-tainted billionaire tycoon would continue to call the shots from the sidelines.</p> <p>However, the former prime minister&#039;s accumulating criminal convictions cast a shadow over the future of the coalition, and the Supreme Court&#039;s upholding of a custodial sentence for Mr Berlusconi in the first of these cases in August 2013 caused further tremors within the government.</p> <p>Mr Berlusconi responded to moves to expel him from parliament and deprive him of his immunity from arrest by attempting to bring down the government. This move backfired when Mr Alfano refused to follow the instructions of his former mentor and formed his own breakaway centre-right faction.</p> <p>But even after having been finally flung out of parliament in November, Mr Berlusconi continued to insist that he would remain a force in Italian politics as the leader of Forza Italia - a party that still enjoys considerable electoral support.</p> <p>Mr Letta, aged 46 at the time of his inauguration, is a moderate with a reputation as a political bridge-builder.</p> <p>On taking office said he would act fast to reverse an austerity policy he argued was killing Italy and called on Europe to become a motor for growth.</p> <p>But tensions within his own party over the pace of reform and differences over economic policy came to a head after Matteo Renzi was elected leader of the PD in December 2013. Mr Renzi forced a showdown in which the PD backed his vision of a new government that could implement &quot;profound change&quot; and get Italy &quot;out of the quagmire&quot;. Mr Letta had no choice but to step down. </p>
Prime Minister > Summary	Greek premier Samaras	Enrico Letta led a grand coalition

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