Lithuania election: Gitanas Nausėda wins first round of presidential vote
Incumbent Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda is on track for another term in office after winning the largest share of votes in the country’s presidential election Sunday, Politico reports.
Nausėda took about 44 percent of the vote in the first round, followed by Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė on 20 percent, according to electoral commission data. As no candidate received an outright majority, the pair will head to a runoff election on May 26.
Lithuanians headed to the polls amid anxieties over security in the region and Russian gains on the battlefield in Ukraine. Lithuania, a NATO member since 2004, borders the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Moscow-friendly Belarus.
Nausėda, a former banker who was elected president of the Baltic country in 2019, is a staunch critic of the Kremlin and has strongly backed Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s full-scale invasion, calling for stronger Western sanctions on Moscow.
He hit out at Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán last October for shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of “flirt[ing] with a regime who is committing … very cruel atrocities on the territory of Ukraine.”
But Nausėda has advocated for rapprochement with China, after the two countries’ relations soured over a Taiwanese de facto embassy in Vilnius. Nausėda called the Lithuanian government’s decision to allow the representative office to open in 2021 under the name Taiwan rather than Taipei a “mistake.”
