President Gitanas Nausėda joined the Communist Party in the late 1980s, just around the time when Lithuania started a movement for independence.
Dovydas Pancerovas, a journalist with Laisvės TV, posted documents, including Nausėda’s application to join the party that ruled the Soviet Union, on Facebook.
“Documents show that he [Nausėda] joined the Communist Party when the Sąjūdis [reform movement] was founded. His application for admission to the Communist Party was submitted on May 20, 1988, and his party ticket was issued on June 27, 1988,” Pancerovas said in his post.
The President’s Office confirmed to BNS that Nausėda did indeed join the Communist Party in May 1988, but said he did not take part in its activities.
Sąjūdis, or the Lithuanian Reform Movement, was founded on June 3, 1988, prompted by Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika policy. Sąjūdis, which included members of the Lithuanian Communist Party, led the country’s drive for independence from the USSR that was declared on March 11, 1990.
“President Gitanas Nausėda was admitted to the Communist Party in May 1988. Documents about this are kept in the State Archives and are available to the public. Once Sąjūdis was launched, Nausėda did not take part in the activities of the Communist Party,” the Presidential Communications Group said in a statement.
When running for presidency in 2019, Nausėda did not indicate his membership in the Communist Party in his bio and left the question about present or past political affiliations blank in the official questionnaire of the Central Electoral Commission.
According to the President’s Office, the question in the questionnaire was optional.
Nausėda was a postgraduate student at the Faculty of Economics of Vilnius University from 1987 to 1989.
Nausėda is not the first president of Lithuania with past affiliations with the Communist Party. Algirdas Brazauskas, elected in 1992, was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania. The party supported Lithuania’s independence and broke off from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in December 1989.
Dalia Grybauskaitė, a two-term president from 2009 until 2019, was also a Communist Party member between 1979 and 1990. She indicated her membership in the questionnaire for the Central Electoral Commission both times she was running for the office.
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