Only months on from the shock victory of far-right Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s first female Prime Minister, another woman is shaking up Italian politics. This time however she’s a feminist and openly queer former art student from Italy’s anti-fascist heartland, Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, who’s been dubbed ‘Italy’s AOC’ and even compared to Jeremy Corbyn.

Meet 37-year-old Elly Schlein, Italy’s new leader of the opposition. Having only re-joined the Democrats (PD, Partito Democratico) two weeks before the February 26th leadership primaries, Schlein threw her name into the ring following changes in the leadership-election rules. The result was a jolt for Italy’s sluggish centre-left: Schlein supplanted a safe-seat Democratic incumbent, the centrist candidate and touted favourite, Stefano Bonnaccini.

“Her victory was completely unexpected, even for voters from the left of the party,” says Paola Panunzio, a teacher from a public high school in Puglia. “Even just a couple of days ago, the government blocked the legal recognition of children of same-sex couples – so it’s important to have a political figure committed to defending minorities and human rights.”

Schlein is the first political leader in Italy for generations to garner notable support from young people, inviting mass applause at last week’s Milan demonstration against the new homophobic law. Her offbeat wit, youth culture references, her appearance on talk shows such as Stasera c’e Cattelan and her simple motto that demands “the right to love who you love” has boosted her credentials as a relatable political leader. By contrast, Meloni’s nationalistic administration resounds with an anachronistic nostalgia for Italy’s past, excluding vast swathes of Gen Z and Millennials who came of age during a digital and internationalising age characterised by notions of openness and fluidity.

“PD, for a long time, had the fundamental role of preventing the far-right from governing… today that mechanism is broken. The right has already won, and Prime Minister Meloni represents a post-fascist government,” commented Enrico Pitzianti, a political commentator based in Bologna. “Schlein’s election suggests the need to return to a less centrist and impassive left… one more suited to a force of real opposition.”

WHO IS ELLY SCHLEIN?

Born in 1985, Schlein is of Italian (her mother) and American-Jewish (her father) descent. In the mid-1990s, while a 15-year-old Giorgia Meloni from Rome’s working-class Garbatella district was joining the youth section of the (now-defunct) neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), Schlein was studying in a Lugano, Switzerland, in an international school – her classmates included refugees from the Balkans. As a young woman Schlein went on to attend art school at Bologna, and had early dreams of becoming a film director – she revered Quentin Tarantino and Korean director, Kim Ki-duk.

But, in her own words, she always had “this impulse to fight against injustice”. Schlein got her first taste of formal political life while working on the 2008 and 2012 Obama Campaigns in the States. The experience taught her that “there is no such thing as a single leader, but a new community that pushes an idea”. She then went on to join the European Parliament as a member of Italy’s PD before quitting the party in 2015, in protest of (Blair-wannabe) Matteo Renzi’s neoliberal proposals, such as his Jobs Act which stripped a central pillar from Italy’s 1970 constitutional labour bill (Statuto dei Lavoratori) that protects workers from firing.

Renzi’s move triggered a backlash from Italian youth who voted him out via referendum in 2015. According to a survey, about 80 per cent of 18-to-34-year-olds opposed Renzi’s propositions, a “tsunami from a generation… rewriting the political map of Italy”. Schlein herself said she “couldn’t bear” PD after Renzi enforced this flagship Jobs Act, citing its disproportionate impact on young people and women. Despite Renzi’s attempt to run as a ‘youth candidate’ at aged 39, he merely cemented his reputation as a dinosaur of the old elite.

This was the backdrop of Schlein’s early political career. She rose to prominence in early 2020 in the post-Renzi years, when her minority party, Coraggiosa (Courageous), played a decisive role in blocking Salvini’s far-right party, Lega, (the precursor to Meloni) from seizing power in anti-fascist bastion, Emilia-Romagna.

Today, she’s a fierce defender of migrants’ rights: after the recent boat tragedy off the coast of Calabria left 79 dead, Schlein described the incident in Parliament as a “weight on the conscience of this government”. 

A NEW DIRECTION

Schlein’s leadership has been likened to the break-through of America’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. On the one hand, both candidates offer an intersectional social democratic project. Like AOC, Schlein supplanted a safe-seat Democratic incumbent.

Abandoning the electoral phantom of ‘middle Italy’, Schlein speaks of ‘struggling Italians’ – those subsisting in energy poverty. This is the “weak point of the right”, she said in a recent interview. “They don’t talk about precarity.” When asked what her first initiative would be, Schlein’s answer was the ‘minimum wage’, as Italy currently has none.

The policy for PD would also be a tactical stick with which to beat the Five Star Movement, an ‘anti-establishment’ formation. Since its inception in 2007, Five Star has managed to cull much of the Democrats’ youth electoral base, by successfully presenting itself as an anti-establishment, left-populist grassroots force ‘from below’. Crucially, it was the only political force that openly backed the Reddito di Cittadinanza (the Basic Income), which especially benefits the young and precarious. Schlein has openly supported the Basic Income, and gone one step further by proposing to extend it to migrants, breaking Five Star’s populist ‘just for Italians’ earlier proposal.

THE ITALIAN CULTURE WAR

The two leading women in Italian politics represent opposite ends of the ‘culture war’ spectrum: if Schlein celebrates fluidity and inclusion, Meloni creates nostalgia for fixed roles and identities. Only recently, and mimicking Meloni’s famous speech (“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am Italian, I am a Christian!” ) Schlein responded by saying that she didn’t understand how being “a woman, a mother and a Christian helps Italians to pay their bills”.

“Elly Schlein’s election is honestly so refreshing… it opens a glimmer of light in the political scene,” says Panunzio. “The image of women in Italy never sunk so low as during the Berlusconi government… it was a shame for Italy. When travelling to other countries, I remember people learning I was Italian and saying ‘pizza, pasta and bunga bunga’.”

At the same time, the challenge for Schlein is how to challenge Meloni without merely mirroring her identitarianism, while simultaneously being attacked for her bisexuality and ethnicity. Yet so far so good. For Bruno Montesano, a 27-year old PhD candidate from Turin University and a contributor to Il Manifesto: “It seems to me that Schlein tries not to oppose Meloni's identitarianism with another form of specific identity… her ‘intersectional social democracy’ means social rights are not hierarchical… social protection does not come at the expense of social plurality.”

WHAT NEXT?

Moderates continue to decry the possible split of the centre-left, and radicals remain sceptical about Schlein’s militant credentials. Yet what can’t be denied is that Schlein has pushed the electoral Overton Window back towards the left. As she said in a recent interview, the left is suffering from the paradox of an “internationalism of the nationalists”: the cross-border unity of Le Pen, Farage, Trump, Salvini, Meloni and Bolsonaro. “They all speak the same language.” On the progressive side, however, “we’re not doing this enough”.

In the end, her power is to act as a ‘foil’ to Meloni – preventing the far-right’s attempt to normalise itself, dressing up as the ‘sensible centre’ or the ‘silent majority’. In a country like Italy, so often the unwitting laboratory for experiments later exported abroad, can Schlein be interpreted as an AOC-Corbyn-style latecomer? Or perhaps is she better understood as a newcomer for something still to come?