Katerina Sakellaropoulou

Katerina Sakellaropoulou was the first woman to be head of state of Greece, elected president in January 2020 by the largest parliamentary majority any Greek president has received. She was a career judge rather than a politician, which is unusual for the office, and had spent her working life on the Council of State, the supreme administrative court, becoming its president in 2018 - also the first woman to hold that post. Her judicial reputation was built on environmental and constitutional cases; she wrote or joined rulings on forest protection, on the status of mosques, and on the constitutionality of austerity measures during the debt crisis, and she dissented in the case concerning the sale of the Skouries mining concession. The nomination came from Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a conservative prime minister, and was supported by Syriza and most of the opposition, so she was elected with two hundred and sixty-one votes out of three hundred; the presidency in Greece is largely ceremonial, and the cross-party breadth was the point of the choice. She took office weeks before the pandemic and made her first public interventions about it. She has spoken on climate, on the position of women, and on the Prespa agreement with North Macedonia, and has generally kept within the limits of an office whose powers were reduced by the constitutional revision of 1986. She was succeeded in 2025 by Konstantinos Tasoulas. She had also chaired the Greek association of judges and prosecutors earlier in her career. She was the first Greek president born after the civil war. She lives with the constitutional lawyer Pavlos Kotsonis and has one daughter. Greece had had a woman as speaker of parliament and as chief justice before, but never as head of state.

• Lived: 1956 CE – ?
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: head_of_state