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

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STAT	Greece	Lithuania	HISTORY
Head of state > Term limit for head of state	5 Ranked 80th. The same as Lithuania	5 Ranked 77th.
President	Karolos Papoulias	Dalia Grybauskaite
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>Dalia Grybauskaite was voted in as Lithuania&#039;s first woman president with an emphatic election victory in May 2009.</p> <p>She won 69% of the vote, against 11% for her closest rival, Algirdas Butkevicius of the opposition Social Democratic Party.</p> <p>Previously the European Union budget commissioner, she stood as an independent, but with backing from the four-party centre-right coalition of Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius.</p> <p>A former finance minister, Ms Grybauskaite&#039;s reputation for plain speaking helped win over an electorate nervous about the severe economic downturn that hit Lithuania in 2008.</p> <p>She is sometimes dubbed the &quot;Iron Lady&quot;, the nickname of former British PM Margaret Thatcher, a steely free-marketeer she describes as one of her political models.</p> <p>Ms Grybauskaite has said that her decision to stand came after anger at the economic slump boiled over in a riot in front of the parliament building in Vilnius in January 2009.</p> <p>She declared herself broadly in support of the centre-right government&#039;s response to the crisis, but criticised some of its tax increases and called on some ministers to &quot;correct mistakes of the past or go&quot;.</p> <p>She took an unprecedentedly interventionist approach after the 2012 parliamentary election, when she initially said that she could not accept a coalition that included the Labour Party, after the party had been accused of electoral irregularities.</p> <p>Born in 1956 in Vilnius - then still part of the Soviet Union - Ms Grybauskaite studied in the Russian city of Leningrad - today&#039;s St Petersburg.</p> <p>A senior civil servant since Lithuania&#039;s independence in 1990, she served as finance minister from 2001 to 2004, when the country nominated her the European Commission after joining the EU that year.</p>
President > Summary	President Karolos Papoulias	Dalia Grybauskaite won the presidency in 2009
Prime Minister	Antonis Samaras	Algirdas Butkevicius
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>Algirdas Butkevicius became prime minister in December 2012, nearly seven weeks after his Social Democratic Party emerged as the biggest party in parliamentary elections.</p> <p>Coalition-building talks between the Social Democrats and their potential partners in government were already well advanced when President Dalia Grybauskaite intervened, saying she could not accept a government that included the Labour Party, which was under investigation after having been accused of electoral and tax fraud.</p> <p>President Grybauskaite later withdrew her veto, on the grounds that the individual ministers nominated by the Labour Party were technocrats rather than party activists and were therefore not implicated in the fraud allegations. </p> <p>Mr Butkevicius&#039;s government has pledged to ease the austerity measures introduced by the previous conservative coalition led by Andrius Kubilius, and one of its first acts after taking office was to raise the minimum wage from 850 litas ($330) to 1,000 litas ($386).</p> <p>He has said that he expects the Lithuanian economy to grow by about 3 percent in 2013, and that the country should be able to meet the economic targets required to adopt the euro by 2015.</p> <p>Born in 1958, Algirdas Butkevicius first trained as an engineer and later gained a doctorate in economics.</p> <p>He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1992 and became an MP for the first time in 1996. He held various ministerial posts during the 2004-2008 Social Democratic minority government, and became the leader of the party in 2009.</p>
Prime Minister > Summary	Greek premier Samaras	Mr Butkevicius has vowed to reverse some of the austerity measures imposed by the previous government

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