Dalia Grybauskaitė

As Financial and Budget Commissioner, she strongly criticized the EU budget, stating it was "not a budget for the 21st century."

The majority of the EU budget was spent on agricultural programmes.

Her mother, Vitalija Korsakaitė (1922–1989), was born in the Biržai region and worked as a saleswoman.

Her father, Polikarpas Grybauskas (1928–2008), was an electrician and driver.

He also was a NKVD serviceman during the Second World War.

Grybauskaitė attended Salomėja Nėris High School.

She has two brothers, one living in Lithuania, and the other living in Colorado Springs, in the United States.

She has described herself as not among the best students, receiving mostly fours in a system where five was the highest grade.

Her favourite subjects were history, geography and physics.

Grybauskaitė 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 Society as a staff inspector.

She then enrolled in A.A. Zhdanov State University in Leningrad, as a student of political economy.

At the same time, she began working in a local factory in Leningrad.

Dalia Grybauskaitė (born 1 March 1956) is a Lithuanian politician who served as the eighth president of Lithuania from 2009 to 2019.

Grybauskaitė was born on 1 March 1956 to a working-class family in Vilnius during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania.

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 and so she moved to the Vilnius Communist Party High School, where she lectured in political economics and global finance.

From 1983 to December 1989, she was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and after the Communist Party of Lithuania broke away from the CPSU in December 1989, she was member of the CPL until June 1990.

In 1988, she defended her PhD thesis at Moscow (Academy of Social Sciences).

In 1990, soon after Lithuania reestablished its independence from the Soviet Union, Grybauskaitė continued her studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., in the Special Programme for senior executives.

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 agreements.

She also chaired the Aid Coordination Committee (Phare and the G24).

Soon afterwards, 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' 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.

Grybauskaitė has served as Minister of Finance, as well as European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget from 2004 to 2009.

She is often referred to as the "Iron Lady" or the "Steel Magnolia".

Lithuania joined the European Union on 1 May 2004, and Grybauskaitė was named a European Commissioner on the same day.

Grybauskaitė initially served as European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth.

She held this position until 11 November 2004, when she was named European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget within the José Manuel Barroso-led Commission.

In November 2005, 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."

She commented:"I don't usually participate in contests, so this is a very pleasant surprise for me. I consider it a distinction not for me personally, but for all the new EU Member States, both small and large, as an acknowledgment of their bringing a new and fresh perspective to the EU. I think that it's also a prize for having the courage to speak the often difficult truth and to point out the real price of political rhetoric in Europe. As for results, we still have to wait for them. An agreement on the budget for 2007–2013, which Europe really needs, is most important."

Grybauskaitė presented a 2008 EU budget in which, for the first time in its history, spending on growth and employment constituted the highest share of the budget, exceeding that of agriculture and natural resources.

She frequently criticised the Lithuanian Government, headed by Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas, for its lack of response to the approaching financial crisis.

She is the first and so far only woman to hold the position and in 2014 she became the first President of Lithuania to be reelected for a second consecutive term.