Rolandas Paksas

Rolandas Paksas (born June 10, 1956, Telsiai, Lith.) is a prime minister (1999, 2000–01) and president (2003–04) of Lithuania. Although he began his political career as a communist, Paksas became prominent in conservative circles and later emerged as a leader of Lithuania’s Liberal and Liberal Democratic parties. He was Europe’s first leader to be removed by impeachment.

Paksas’s father was a railway clerk and later worked in the wholesale grain trade. His mother’s family was deported to Siberia but escaped Soviet concentration camps, and she worked as a nurse. Paksas graduated from Vilnius Civil Engineering Institute (now Vilnius Gediminas Technical University) as a civil engineer in 1979 and from the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Academy of Civil Aviation as an engineer-pilot in 1984. He worked as a pilot instructor from 1979 to 1985 and headed a flying club in Vilnius from 1985 to 1992. During that period, Paksas was a member of both the Lithuanian and Soviet national aerobatics teams, winning several championships. In 1992 he founded the Restako construction company.

Paksas joined the conservative Homeland Union and won a seat in the Vilnius city council in 1997. He was elected mayor of the capital two years later. After the resignation of Prime Minister Gediminas Vagnorius in 1999, Paksas succeeded him in office. Paksas resigned a scant five and a half months later, however, after an emotional address in which he declined to support a proposal to invite American investment in Mažeikių Nafta, Lithuania’s giant oil company. Suddenly persona non grata to the conservatives, Paksas joined a small liberal party. He worked as an adviser to Pres. Valdas Adamkus, was reelected mayor of Vilnius, and won a seat in the Seimas (parliament). From October 2000 to June 2001 he served a second time as prime minister, but he resigned after the split of the coalition of Liberals and Social-Liberals, remaining a member of the Parliamentary Economic Committee.

Paksas founded the centre-right Liberal Democratic Party (Liberalų Demokratų Partija; LDP) in March 2002. Under its banner, he won the presidency of Lithuania in the second round of elections on Jan. 5, 2003, with 54.7 percent of the vote. His success came as a surprise to many. All the major parties had backed the incumbent, Adamkus, who symbolized the unity and the stability of the country and campaigned on his success in gaining Lithuania’s integration into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. When Paksas was sworn in as president on Feb. 26, 2003, he promised radical changes and a rise in living standards, particularly for less-fortunate people.

Paksas’s short time in office was characterized by flexibility. He was determined and enthusiastic on the stump, and he seemed to enjoy better relations with Russia, Lithuania’s giant neighbour, than had his predecessors. On the other hand, his presidency was marred by allegations that he had ties to organized crime. At the end of 2003, there were calls for his impeachment after Lithuania’s highest court ruled that he had violated the country’s constitution.

Parliament removed Paksas from office in April 2004. He went back to lead the LDP, which was part of a new coalition, For Order and Justice. Although Paksas could no longer hold public office, he continued to wield political influence behind the scenes.