Italy still reserves room for surprises. Against all odds, the voters of the Democratic Party (PD) have chosen the leftist Elly Schlein as their new general secretary. The young deputy, 37 years old and with a disruptive agenda, has prevailed in a primary against the veteran governor of Emilia-Romagna, Stefano Bonaccini, who started her as her favorite. For the first time, Italy will have two women on the political front line: a prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who will have to measure herself against a head of the opposition.
“We have made a small great revolution. They haven’t seen us arrive this time either. The democratic people are alive and ready to rise up”, declared the winner after knowing the results of the vote in which more than a million voters participated. “We will do it with a clear line that puts the fight against inequalities, for decent work and to face the climate emergency at the center,” she promised.
Feminist, environmentalist and an icon of the fight for LGBT rights, Schlein has been the formula chosen to get the party out of the cycle of electoral defeats and internal divisions that have led it to its lowest hours. She is considered an outsider who was not even born in Italy, but she was born in Lugano (Switzerland) from an Italian family and studied Law in Bologna. Her maternal grandfather was a partisan, and her paternal, a Jew who emigrated to the US escaping persecution in Ukraine. She volunteered in Obama’s election campaigns, and then she was elected as an MEP in 2014, before tearing up the PD card and founding a more left-wing party that she ended up leaving. She represents the most progressive area of ??the party, the one that she believes has moved too far away from the working classes in recent years to focus on the metropolitan elite vote.
“She has been more capable than I of giving a sense of renewal to the Democratic Party”, has acknowledged Bonaccini, who until not long ago was her boss, by accepting the defeat with 80% of the vote counted. Schlein’s name began to after he helped prevent the right-wing coalition from taking over Emilia-Romagna, a traditional stronghold of the left, in early 2020. As usual in recent years, he rose to fame by sharing a video on the social networks in which he left the leader of the League speechless, Matteo Salvini Since then he has been crowned as the rising star of the Italian left.
Later she was elected vice president of this region, and in the last elections in September she ran as an independent on the PD lists. Due to her anti-neoliberal speech, her ability in the networks and her origins, some media outlets have compared her to the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She does not hesitate to present herself as the antithesis of Meloni, and in the last electoral campaign she was applauded when she turned around the famous slogan of the leader of the Brothers of Italy, – “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian ”– and cried: “Yes, I am a woman, I love another woman and I am not a mother. But that doesn’t make me less of a woman.”
If Bonaccini represented a classic figure on the Italian left, with experience, solidity, a reputation as a good manager and as a moderate, some saw him as too similar to the latest leaders, such as the former governor of Lazio Nicola Zingaretti or the former prime minister Enrico Letta, who He has already congratulated his successor. Schlein’s bet can be seen as imprudent in a country as traditional as Italy, but also as a breath of fresh air in a party that urgently needed renewal and that has often been accused of being too obsessed with staying in government. . He already fought against it in his early years as an activist, when she was one of the young people who launched a group –OccupyPD– to occupy the party headquarters in protest of the agreement with Silvio Berlusconi’s right.
“We will be a good problem for Giorgia Meloni. From today we will organize the opposition, in defense of the poor that the Government beats, of the exploited workers, of the public school. We will make barricades against the privatization of health ”, he has guaranteed. Now his first task will be to approach Giuseppe Conte’s 5 Star Movement to mark the lines of combat for the right-wing Executive and regain the attention of abstentionists, many of them disenchanted leftist voters. He also has the mission of rejuvenating a formation wounded by its multiple currents.
