“We have made a small great revolution. They have not seen us arrive this time either.”
With these words, Elly Schlein, the winner of the primaries to elect the Secretary General of the Italian Democratic Party (PD), inaugurated her stage, in which for the first time a woman is in charge of an organization that urgently needed a breath of fresh air after too many electoral defeats and divisions between internal currents.
Young – he is 37 years old -, from the left, feminist, environmentalist and openly bisexual, Schlein can be seen as daring in a country as conservative as Italy, but he undoubtedly represents a convulsion in a party in an identity crisis after chaining governments in the last years.
Born in 1985 in Lugano (Switzerland) into an Italian family, Elly (Elena) Schlein’s story is unique. Her maternal grandfather was a partisan, and her paternal, a Jew who emigrated to the United States to escape persecution in the Ukraine. Her parents moved to Switzerland to work as university professors. He, Melvin Schlein, is a renowned political scientist, while her mother, Maria Paola Viviani, is an expert in Public Law. Schlein moved to Bologna to study law in 2011. She has two siblings, the mathematician Benjamin Schlein and Susanna Schlein, a diplomat at the Italian embassy in Athens, which was recently attacked by an anarchist group.
The new general secretary of the PD began political activism at a very young age and participated as a volunteer in Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in the US. Later, she was part of the young people who formed the Occupy PD group to occupy the party’s headquarters in protest by an agreement with Silvio Berlusconi.
In 2014 she was elected MEP –with more than 50,000 votes–, before tearing up the PD card and founding a party more to the left due to her disenchantment with the liberal turn taken by the then other young leader of the PD, Matteo Renzi, but he also ended up leaving. In Brussels, Schlein became a nightmare for the far-right Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, whom she constantly criticized for his anti-immigration stances.
His name caught on in Italy in 2020, when he helped secure victory for the left in the Emilia-Romagna region, a red stronghold where for the first time the right had a chance to rule. As usual in recent years, he rose to fame by sharing a video on social networks in which he left Salvini speechless by reproaching him for his absence at the various meetings on the reform of the Dublin regulation.
Since then, the rising star of the Italian left has been baptized and became number two for veteran governor Stefano Bonaccini in Emilia-Romagna, the other candidate for the primaries, whom he has now defeated with 53% of support. “She has been more capable than I of giving a sense of renewal to the Democratic Party,” acknowledged her rival and her former boss after admitting defeat in a vote in which more than a million people participated. Bonaccini started out as the great favorite after winning the first election of the militancy, and his solvency and pragmatism endorsed him, but it did not represent a break in a formation that in each election distances itself further from the popular classes to confirm itself as the favorite option of the establishment and metropolitan areas.
In the last early elections in September, he ran as an independent for Parliament and, after the poor results obtained that forced Enrico Letta to resign from the leadership, he did not hesitate to present his candidacy. Schlein speaks openly about the need for a progressive turn in education, to defend education and public health, to protect workers and not to criminalize immigration. In short, for the PD to recover the essence of a left-wing party. He gives the example of Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE, “to avoid being France”, where the Social Democrats have been practically swept away. For this he will not hesitate to reach out to Giuseppe Conte’s 5 Star Movement, which achieved a good result by running a campaign focused on the most disadvantaged.
Due to her anti-neoliberal discourse, her ability in the networks and her origins, some media have compared her to the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is a great champion of LGTBI rights and, although she now has a girlfriend, she has said that in the past she has loved men.
Since yesterday, for the first time, two completely antagonistic women are at the head of the two main parties in Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as leader of the Brothers of Italy and Schlein of the Social Democrats. “We’ll be a good problem for Giorgia Meloni,” Schlein promised in his victory speech. The first step of it will be the election of the leading leadership with the closest, most representatives of a new generation in the PD.
