Schlein, rising figure of the Italian left, candidate to lead the PD

The list of candidates to lead the Italian Democratic Party (PD) was extended yesterday with a prominent name, that of the former MEP Elly Schlein, considered the great promise of the Italian left, a young 37-year-old politician who represents the most progressive area of ​​the party and that yesterday made official its participation in the primaries to choose the successor of Enrico Letta.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
04 December 2022 Sunday 18:30
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Schlein, rising figure of the Italian left, candidate to lead the PD

The list of candidates to lead the Italian Democratic Party (PD) was extended yesterday with a prominent name, that of the former MEP Elly Schlein, considered the great promise of the Italian left, a young 37-year-old politician who represents the most progressive area of ​​the party and that yesterday made official its participation in the primaries to choose the successor of Enrico Letta.

The Italian Social Democrats are in the process of refounding and are called to elect their new leader in the congress to be held on February 19, called by Letta himself after he announced his resignation after losing the elections on September 25 before the far-right Giorgia Meloni.

Then, the former prime minister asked that women and the new generations be protagonists of a party that has been accused of machismo on many occasions on the lists. Schlein, feminist, environmentalist and an icon of the fight for LGBT rights, meets these two conditions, and has also not hesitated to present herself as the antithesis of Meloni. At the party's closing campaign rally in Rome, he raised Piazza del Popolo by turning 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 she 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."

Elly Schlein's name began to make waves in early 2020, after she helped prevent the right-wing coalition from taking over the Emilia-Romagna region, a traditional stronghold of the left. She was later elected vice president of this region, and in these elections she ran as an independent candidate on the PD lists. Due to her progressive positions and her origins – her father is American – she has been compared by the Anglo-Saxon media with the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Schlein launched his candidacy with a long-awaited act in Rome in which the choirs of Bella Ciao were not absent and in which he assured that the party must find a "clear, understandable and coherent" identity as a left-wing force that aspires to "change the model of neoliberal development, which has proven to be unsustainable”. In recent years, the PD has been accused of having forgotten its leftist soul to represent the interests of the wealthy classes, while the workers' vote has often gone to far-right parties or the 5-Star Movement. “A new story begins with us that can build the alternative that this country deserves. The Meloni government has already shown its face, ”he assured his own.

The former MEP will not have it easy, since she is not the favorite of the formation establishment. She is the third person to officially run in the PD primaries. She will compete with someone she knows very well, Stefano Bonaccini, president of Emilia-Romagna, and former minister Paola de Micheli. She is also expected to present other well-known names such as former Labor Minister Andrea Orlando.