Dalia Grybauskaite

President of Lithuania

Dalia Grybauskaitė born 1 March 1956) is a Lithuanian politician and the current President of Lithuania inaugurated on July 12, 2009. She was previously Lithuania's Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Finance Minister, and European Commissioner for Financial Programming & the Budget. Often referred to as the "Iron Lady", Grybauskaitė is Lithuania's first female head of state.

Early years

Dalia Grybauskaitė was born on 1 March 1956 into a working-class family in Vilnius. Her mother, Vitalija Korsakaitė (1922-1989), born in the Biržai region, worked as a saleswoman; her father, Polikarpas Grybauskas (1928-2008) worked as an electrician and as a driver. Grybauskaitė attended Salomėja Nėris High School. She has described herself as not among the best of students, receiving mostly fours in a system where five was the highest grade. Her favorite subjects were history, geography and physics.

She began participating in sports at the age of eleven, and became a passionate basketball player. At the age of nineteen she worked for a year at the Lithuanian National Philharmonic as staff inspector. She then enrolled in Saint Petersburg State University, then known as Zhdanov University, as a student of political economy. At the same time she began working in a local factory. In 1983 Grybauskaitė graduated with a citation and returned to Vilnius, taking a secretarial position at the Academy of Sciences. Work in the Academy was scarce, however, and she moved to the Vilnius Party High School, where she lectured in political economy and global finance. In 1988 she defended her Ph.D thesis at Moscow's Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy of State Service).

In 1990, soon after Lithuania re-established its independence from the Soviet Union, Grybauskaitė continued her studies at the Georgetown University (Washington DC) School of Foreign Service in the Special Program for senior executives.

Early career

Between 1991 and 1993 Grybauskaitė worked as Director of the European Department at the Ministry of International Economic Relations of the Republic of Lithuania. During 1993 she was employed in the Foreign Ministry as director of the Economic Relations Department, and represented Lithuania when it entered the European Union Free Trade Agreement. She also chaired the Aid Coordination Committee (PHARE and the G-24). Soon afterwords she was named Extraordinary Envoy and Plenipotentiary Minister at the Lithuanian Mission to the EU. There she worked as the deputy chief negotiator for the EU Europe Agreement and as a representative of the National Aid Co-ordination in Brussels.

In 1996 Grybauskaitė was appointed Plenipotentiary Minister in the United States's Lithuanian embassy. She held this position until 1999, when she was appointed deputy Minister of Finance. As part of this role, she led Lithuanian negotiations with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In 2000, Grybauskaitė became Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, going on in 2001 to become Minister of Finance in the Algirdas Brazauskas government. Lithuania joined the European Union on 1 May 2004, and Grybauskaitė was named a European Commissioner on the same day.

Political analysts attributed the easy victory to Grybauskaitė's financial competence and her ability to avoid domestic scandals. The international press was quick to dub her the "Lithuanian Iron Lady" for her outspoken speech and her black belt in karate. Grybauskaitė, who speaks Lithuanian, English, Russian, French and Polish, has mentioned Margaret Thatcher and Mahatma Gandhi as her political role models.

 

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