Dalia Grybauskaitė

Dalia Grybauskaitė is a Lithuanian economist and politician who served two consecutive terms as President of the Republic of Lithuania from 2009 to 2019, becoming the first woman elected to the office and the first Lithuanian president to win re-election since the country regained independence in 1990. She was widely known by the nickname the Iron Lady of the Baltics.

Born in 1956 in Vilnius, then part of the Soviet Union, Grybauskaitė worked in a fur factory before studying political economy at the Zhdanov University of Leningrad, graduating in 1983, and later earned a doctorate from the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow in 1988. After Lithuania declared independence in 1990 she retrained in international economic relations at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

She joined the Lithuanian foreign ministry in 1991, served as deputy chief negotiator for the country's accession to the European Union, and was Minister of Finance from 2001 to 2004. From 2004 until her presidential candidacy in 2009 she was a European Commissioner, holding the financial-programming and budget portfolio in the Barroso Commission.

Running as an independent, Grybauskaitė was elected president in May 2009 with around sixty-nine percent of the first-round vote and re-elected in 2014. As president she steered Lithuania through the eurozone crisis, accession to the euro in 2015, and the Russian annexation of Crimea, taking a notably hard line toward Moscow.

The name Dalia is a Lithuanian feminine name connected to the Lithuanian goddess Dalia, who personifies fate and fortune; she carried it as a woman's name.