In a surprise result, Italy’s Democratic Party (PD) picked Elly Schlein as its new leader to give the country’s opposition a new direction after last year’s electoral defeat to Meloni’s national-conservative coalition. Schlein, a former MEP, is as radically progressive as one gets, setting up the stage for an exciting battle of visions for Italy.
Coming from an American-Italian family of academics—hailing from a line of Ukrainian Jewish refugees and Italian socialist partisans—Schlein was born in Switzerland, graduated from the University of Bologna, and started her political career in the U.S., lending support to both of Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaigns. In Italy, she founded the student association Progrè, aimed at sensitizing public opinion on social justice issues such as immigration.
She joined the Democratic Party (PD) in 2013, where she consistently championed more progressive policies. She was elected as an MEP for PD in 2014, not long before she announced that she was leaving the party over her disillusionment with Matteo Renzi’s leadership. But after the Right’s spectacular victory in 2022 and Enrico Letta’s subsequent resignation from the head of PD, Schlein rejoined the Democrats and decided to run for its leadership against the more moderate Stefano Bonaccini, who was persistently ahead of her in the polls. However, with a comfortable margin, Schlein was elected president of the PD on Sunday, February 26th.
It’s no surprise that Schlein is frequently described as being the antithesis of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Whereas Meloni—and her conservative coalition centered around Fratelli d’Italia—are regularly described as far-right nationalists akin to Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, and whose stunning election victory was in large part due to Meloni’s strong stance on immigration among other divisive ‘social justice’ issues, democrats under Schlein are anticipated to be the exact opposite, gradually dropping the ‘center’ from center-left.
In essence, Schlein represents the same type of young and passionate progressivism that is being increasingly associated with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. She is everything that a woke reform of an old and exhausted social-democrat party would need: openly bisexual, radically feminist, vocally pro-European, and even subscribes to the right amount of populism in its leftist sense—appealing to the most disenfranchised instead of the elites that she accuses the modern Left of courting.
Schlein’s new—“progressive, environmentalist, and feminist”—platform is designed down to the last details to offer a direct alternative to the current conservative government. The PD’s new president was known to belong to the party’s more socialist wing, which now not only took over but is transforming the party’s image as the country’s main anti-fascist resistance.
For the first time ever, both the Italian prime minister and the de facto leader of the Italian opposition will be female. This does not mean, however, that Schlein and Meloni will not clash on feminist issues just like on everything else. “Not all female leaderships are feminist,” Schlein said earlier, referring to the prime minister. “Politically, we’re poles apart.” Indeed, some of Meloni’s hallmark policy positions (relating to immigration or LGBT rights) can be expected to be strongly challenged by the Schlein-led Democrats in the coming years.
Nonetheless, whether this swing toward the Left will be enough to turn around the Democratic Party’s plummeting popularity remains to be seen. With 19%, the PD came in second in last year’s election after Fratelli d’Italia, but continued to fall behind in the polls to the current 16% as the governing party climbed to 30%. Despite being the clear runner-up in 2022, now it’s only the second most popular opposition party, being taken over by the anti-establishment populists of the Five Star Movement (M5S). If the polls represent public opinion correctly, left-leaning Italians do want a more radical opposition to Meloni’s conservatives, and Schlein seems to be cut out for that exact job.
The following years will most probably be about Meloni and Schlein’s competing visions for Italy clashing over and over. Both women—young, passionate, and ambitious—represent the same polarization of Italian and European politics. They embody the process of both Left and Right moving further from the center, serving as cause and symptom for each other. For the moment, conservatives remain at the helm in Italy, but only time will tell how well they can withstand this radically new challenge.
