Italy’s largest opposition party gets young, radical new leader

Suddenly there are not one but two women at the top of Italian politics. On February 26th, the members of Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party (pd) confounded poll forecasts, by electing as their new leader a 37-year-old radical, Elly Schlein.

In a two-way contest with the mainstream candidate and governor of the Emilia-Romagna region, Stefano Bonaccini, Ms Schlein took around 54 per cent of the vote, The Economist reports.

She was, and is, an outsider in more ways than one. Ms Schlein grew up in Switzerland and has dual American and Italian nationality. She is in a relationship with a woman and was not even a member of the pd until recently, having quit it back in 2015 in protest at the labour-market liberalisation policies of Matteo Renzi, a former pd prime minister.

Ms Schlein’s election has about it both the feel of a wind of change and that of an air of desperation. It signals the latest advance for women in a country that has notably lagged behind others in Europe in terms of female political representation. Until 2013 less than 20 per cent of Italy’s parliamentarians were women—a lower proportion than in Afghanistan.

Today, the figure is 31 per cent and since October Italy has had a female prime minister in Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy (fdi) party.

Ms Schlein’s victory will also come as a shock to her party’s deeply entrenched old guard. But then a key reason why the pd’s voters turned to Ms Schlein was that in recent months their leadership of the party had turned from a disappointment into an embarrassment.

The product of a merger between the remnants of the more moderate wing of Italy’s Communist Party and those of the more progressive wing of its Christian Democratic Party, the pd slumped to a mere 19 per cent of the vote in the general election in September.

By November, it had been overtaken in the polls by the maverick Five Star Movement (m5s), which is trying to project itself as Italy’s leading opposition party even though it has fewer lawmakers. In recent soundings, the PD has averaged a miserable 16.4 per cent, against 17.7 per cent for the m5s.

Ms Schlein’s immediate task will be to reverse that reversal. The Five Stars’ leader, Giuseppe Conte, a former prime minister, has until now succeeded with a distinctly radical stance that Ms Schlein can probably adopt with greater plausibility. She called her election “a clear mandate for real change”.

Ms Schlein has won comparisons with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an American congresswoman from the Democratic Party. But some in the pd will doubtless fret that her election is all too reminiscent of the British Labour Party’s forlorn resort to another radical, Jeremy Corbyn, in 2015.

Besting Mr Conte also carries risks. Only by uniting at the next election can the left beat the right. Perhaps Ms Schlein’s trickiest task in the longer term will be to heal the many breaches among Italy’s divided progressives.

A more pressing issue is whether she can offer effective opposition to the similarly radical Ms Meloni. Backed by a four-way coalition and an outright majority in parliament, Ms Meloni has so far had a remarkably smooth ride.

Her strength, though it could yet come to be seen as a weakness, has been her conversion to moderation. Far from distancing Italy from the rest of Europe, as some had feared, Ms Meloni has enthusiastically supported nato’s position on Ukraine and steered through parliament a budget for 2023 that broadly respects the European Commission’s insistence on fiscal prudence.

Both policies leave her open to attack. At the very least, Ms Schlein’s election looks certain to enliven a political scene that had seemed uncharacteristically settled.