Dalia Grybauskaite was elected to be Lithuania’s first woman president yesterday in an overwhelming victory. According to Agence France Presse, with 99.46 percent of votes counted, Grybauskaite held an overwhelming 69.05 percent of the vote.
Grybauskaite ran as an independent and is a former finance minister in Lithuania who currently serves as European Union budget commissioner.
Public anger about Lithuania’s current economic crisis drove Grybauskaite’s election. According to Voice of America, unemployment has reached 15 percent and the economy is expected to shrink by nearly 16 percent this year. Grybauskaite told Voice of America “I think that the political elite devaluated themselves and people do not trust local politics any more….And my own experience and my own results in my career show people that I can be trusted.”
