Dalia Grybauskaitė
Dalia Grybauskaitė was president of Lithuania from 2009 to 2019, the first woman and the first to win two terms, and the first elected in the first round, with sixty-nine per cent in May 2009, the European commissioner for the budget whom the crash had made the country's choice for a job that needed someone who understood money. She became the Baltic's iron lady, the black belt in karate who told Putin's Russia what it was, a terrorist state, after Crimea. She refused to attend the Sochi Olympics, and pushed the NATO battalions into the Baltic in 2016 and the American troops into Poland. She had Lithuania build a liquefied gas terminal at Klaipėda called Independence to end Gazprom's monopoly in 2014. She took the country into the euro in 2015 through a recession in which output had fallen fifteen per cent in a year and public pay a third. She was born in Vilnius in 1956, the daughter of an electrician and a shop assistant, worked in a fur factory while studying political economy at Leningrad, took a doctorate at the Moscow Academy of Social Sciences in 1988 and taught at the party school in Vilnius, a Communist past she has said was the only way to study. Then she trained at Georgetown in 1991 and served the new state as a diplomat in Washington, deputy finance minister, deputy foreign minister, finance minister in 2001-04. From 2004 she was the commissioner in Brussels whom the parliament there named commissioner of the year. The presidency was the vetoes, forty of them, and the quarrels with the governments, the refusal to sign anything she called the oligarchs' law. There was the scandal of the emails in 2019 that showed her office had coordinated with a business group, the prosecution of judges for bribery in her last year, and an approval rating that never fell below sixty per cent. The criticism was that she governed alone, took no advice and had no party, which was the point of her. She has been mentioned for every European job since, and has taken none. She has said in 2025 that the war in Ukraine is Europe's war and that Lithuania's five per cent of output on defence is what a border looks like.
- Lived: 1956 CE – ?
- Nationality: Lithuanian
- Roles: president, economist, politician
