The head of state insists she sets lower requirements for the incumbent ruling coalition than the previous conservative center-right government of Andrius Kubilius as the former government was "of different quality."
"I would like to say that work is tougher for the incumbent government. And not only because I would like to justify somebody, but I evaluate the coalition's quality, actions of coalition partners, and joint work is really complicated there at the moment. This government is led by Social Democrats, they took on responsibility for such a coalition, and, of course, the whole responsibility load is on the Social Democrats' shoulders to a large extent. Therefore, as I see how it's difficult to coordinate interests, opinions in the four-party coalition, I just would like to encourage the government to start making decisions which are very hard to make," the president said.
According to the president, it was obvious after the general elections that work for such a ruling coalition would be tough, especially to coordinate interests and make decisions the state and the people need.
"It starts to show very clearly. This is why I also suggested to the Social Democrats to form a different coalition. I really didn't want to be a prophet of doom, saying it would be very and very difficult to work. The time of decisions will come with the fall when concrete decisions will have to be made as the budget and other accompanying documents will come in," the Lithuanian president said.
Grybauskaitė refused to speculate on new coalitions, and expressed hope that the coalition partners "will finally manage to agree and start working."
"It seems so far that the wagon is pulled into different directions," Grybauskaitė said. In her words, it's too early to relax as the situation is not as pretty, especially around Lithuania, as we would like it to be. Therefore, responsible decisions must be made by any coalition and any government.
"I am ready to help the government work as long as it makes no mistakes and acts responsibly. The fact that this coalition, especially the Social Democrats, find it very hard is obvious. But they themselves made the decision to form such a coalition," Grybauskaitė said.
The president stressed that she supports Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius and the Social Democrats in the ruling coalition as she sees under what conditions they have to work.
"I would have been much more critical of the previous conservative Kubilius government than I am of the Social Democrats because the previous coalition was of a different quality. We could hope and demand a lot more from the previous coalition than from the incumbent one," the Lithuanian president said.
