"Personally I have allergy to membership in any political party because I was supposed to be in one party 23 years ago so now I try to avoid it," the president said in an interview to Deutsche Welle.
Grybauskaitė gave the interview during her last week's visit in Aachen where she accepted the Charlemagne Prize.
Pressed to talk about her political convictions, Grybauskaitė said she was neither a conservative, nor a socialist. "I do what is necessary to do for the country and I never treat myself purely as a politician," she insisted.
In the beginning of her career in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Grybauskaitė was a teacher at a prestigious school run by the Communist Party. What did she do, Deutsche Welle asked, when she realized that ideologically-inflected things she taught to her students might have been wrong?
"I was teaching only economics and the history of economic thought, so there was nothing bad about it," Grybauskaitė replied. "For example, I started my lessons with Aristotle's theories and after that, Marxism. It was very interesting for me what I was doing."
She said she was also teaching the history of money. "So I was purely an economist and already then, I think, I was teaching only objective messages and theories," Grybauskaitė insisted.
Asked about her role models of political leadership, the Lithuanian president said she admired Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and Angela Merkel.
