The 37-year-old MP and US-Italian Elly Schlein prevailed in the ballot, in which a million center-left voters took part. She won with 54 percent of the vote once morest the favorite, Stefano Bonaccini, president of the northern Italian region of Emilia Romagna.
The victory of Schlein, who grew up in Switzerland, is considered a surprise, because according to polls, the experienced political professional Bonaccini was considered the favorite from the start. During the election campaign, Schlein had promised to fundamentally renew the party. She wants to profile herself as “anti-Meloni” and assert herself with a clear left-wing policy once morest the right-wing government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has been in office since October. For the first time in Italian history, two women are at the helm of the country’s two main political parties.
Schlein, who was born in Lugano, worked on former US President Barack Obama’s campaign team in 2008 and 2012 and was compared in the Italian media to the democratic US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her rapid rise and political commitment.
During the election campaign, Schlein said she wanted to unite her fragmented Democratic Party (PD/Partito Democratico) and campaign for a transition to a green economy, fairer jobs and more prosperity. “The social-democratic people are alive and ready to rise up. I received a clear mandate for real change in the party,” Schlein said on Monday night following her election victory. “We will focus on fighting any kind of inequality,” she added.
The Democratic Party is Italy’s main opposition party. It had received around 20 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections, finishing second behind Meloni’s post-fascist group Fratelli d’Italia (FdI/Brothers of Italy). According to polls, she recently lost support in the course of the EU corruption scandal, in which some Italian left-wing politicians are involved.
There was lively participation in the election for the Social Democrat leadership on Sunday. The successor to the previous PD leader and former Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who announced his resignation following his party’s defeat in the parliamentary elections last September, was elected. All Italians were entitled to vote, regardless of their party affiliation, for a fee of two euros.
