Dalia Grybauskaite

From Wikigender.org

Dalia Grybauskaite, the first female President of Lithuania

Dalia Grybauskaite (1956 - ) is the first elected female President of Lithuania, formally serving as European Commissioner for Financial Programming and Budget. She was previously Lithuania's finance minister.

Education

Academic Degree - Doctor of Social Sciences
1983 Zhdanov University (Leningrad; now Saint Petersburg), Economics
1991 Georgetown University (Washington DC), School of Foreign Service, Special Program for Senior Executives

Grybauskaitė speaks Lithuanian, English, Russian, French and Polish.

European Commission

In November 2005 Dalia Grybauskaitė was named "Commissioner of the Year" in the European Voice Europeans of the Year poll. She was nominated "for her unrelenting efforts to shift EU spending towards areas that would enhance competitiveness such as research and development".

Presidential Election 2009

Grybauskaitė, who was standing as an independent, received 68.17% of the vote on a turnout of 51.7%. Her margin of victory was so great that no second round of voting was required. Rival candidate Algirdas Butkevicius, a Social Democrat parliamentarian, came second with 12% of the vote. She will take office on 12 July, 2009.