On the eve of last autumn’s crushing election defeat for Italy’s Democratic party (PD), one of the party’s youthful rising stars addressed a cri de coeur to a rally in Rome. “I am a woman,” said Elly Schlein, “I love another woman and I am not a mother, but I am no less a woman for this.” The words were a clever liberal rejoinder to Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who had famously signalled her social conservatism on LGBT+ rights and abortion with the formulation: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian.”
This weekend’s surprise election of Ms Schlein as the first female leader of the PD ensures that this radical clash of perspectives – along with similarly clear blue water on inequality, the green transition and the migration crisis – is now front and centre in Italian politics. A startling turn of events, for a previously moribund centre-left it is also a potentially galvanising one.
Ms Schlein’s political precocity and radicalism has seen her compared to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her emphatic run-off victory reversed the result of a first- round poll – restricted to the PD party membership – which gave a more moderate opponent, Stefano Bonaccini, a clear lead. Open primary rules governing the second round appear to have motivated large numbers outside the party to vote to shake it up and move it to the left.
Ms Schlein’s unexpected triumph reflects an accumulated sense of frustration among Italian progressives, as successive populist waves have transformed the political landscape and empowered the new radical right. In recent years, the PD has been criticised for failing to establish a clear identity, while propping up crisis-torn and technocratic governments. The appointment as leader of a 37-year-old campaigner on inequality and the environment – one who temporarily left the party in protest at its drift to the centre under Matteo Renzi – has, in effect, called time on an era in which the PD became associated with defending the unsatisfactory status quo.
It is a move that opens up possibilities but comes with considerable risks attached. The PD’s new leader has been given a mandate to be radical, but if Ms Schlein is to succeed she will also need to be pragmatic enough to construct a winning coalition. Chronic division – between the PD and the Five Star Movement, but also with the smaller centrist parties, has been the gift which keeps on giving to Ms Meloni.
Whether there will be any attempt to craft an understanding with Mr Renzi, who now leads the Italia Viva party, remains to be seen. But in any case Ms Schlein faces the task of widening her appeal, and that of the party she leads, beyond the largely youthful and urban social movements which have propelled her rise to date. In Germany, Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party has made a concerted effort to expand support beyond a graduate, professional base in the cities. To recover from dismal poll ratings currently in the mid-teens, the PD will also need to find a way to win back blue-collar voters who have defected to the right.
In the lead-up to Sunday’s poll, Ms Schlein warned the PD against trying to “be everything and the opposite of everything”. Her charisma, clarity and energy promise a new start. But building broad alliances will be just as crucial in the battle to defeat Ms Meloni.
