Lithuania Leaders Stats

Dalia Grybauskaite was voted in as Lithuania's first woman president with an emphatic election victory in May 2009.

She won 69% of the vote, against 11% for her closest rival, Algirdas Butkevicius of the opposition Social Democratic Party.

Previously the European Union budget commissioner, she stood as an independent, but with backing from the four-party centre-right coalition of Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius.

A former finance minister, Ms Grybauskaite's reputation for plain speaking helped win over an electorate nervous about the severe economic downturn that hit Lithuania in 2008.

She is sometimes dubbed the "Iron Lady", the nickname of former British PM Margaret Thatcher, a steely free-marketeer she describes as one of her political models.

Ms Grybauskaite has said that her decision to stand came after anger at the economic slump boiled over in a riot in front of the parliament building in Vilnius in January 2009.

She declared herself broadly in support of the centre-right government's response to the crisis, but criticised some of its tax increases and called on some ministers to "correct mistakes of the past or go".

She took an unprecedentedly interventionist approach after the 2012 parliamentary election, when she initially said that she could not accept a coalition that included the Labour Party, after the party had been accused of electoral irregularities.

Born in 1956 in Vilnius - then still part of the Soviet Union - Ms Grybauskaite studied in the Russian city of Leningrad - today's St Petersburg.

A senior civil servant since Lithuania's independence in 1990, she served as finance minister from 2001 to 2004, when the country nominated her the European Commission after joining the EU that year.