The excitement in the chattering classes of Western Europe is high after Elly Schlein was elected the new leader of Italy’s left-wing Democratic Party. It is the first time that a woman has led the Italian left. The Guardian quoted the 37-year-old as saying her party will now be “a problem” for Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
On the other hand. Schlein’s rise to party chairmanship is an election gift for Meloni, who only has sex in common with her new adversary.
Schlein drew no lessons from the collapse of the French socialists
Raised by a single mother in a working-class area of Rome, Meloni earned her living as a bartender and nanny during her youth. Schlein was born in Switzerland to an American father and an Italian mother, both university professors. She settled in Italy at the age of 19 and studied law at the University of Bologna; Her website states that her doctoral thesis deals with “the issue of the over-representation of migrants in prisons and the rights of foreigners in constitutional courts”.
Schlein, who has Swiss, Italian and US citizenship, worked as a volunteer in Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaign.
Arguably where Meloni and Schlein differ most is in their approach to the migrant crisis, which has already seen 14,104 migrants land on Italian soil this year, a 163 percent increase from the same period in 2022. Meloni’s goal is to stemming the flow of migrants in the Mediterranean, while Schlein rejoiced last year when a migrant activist was acquitted of aiding and abetting illegal immigrants. ‘Solidarity is not a crime!’ she tweeted.
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These facts make Schlein the new darling of metropolitan millennials in the West, many of whom are still struggling to come to terms with Jacinda Arden’s resignation last month.
It was revealing that Schlein did best in the leadership competition in the big cities, soaking up votes from young leftists, but lagged behind her rival Stefano Bonaccini in rural southern Italy.
Will she be able to win back the six million voters who have left the Democratic Party in recent years? They left for the same reason that so many working-class voters left their traditional parties in Britain and France: because they no longer have anything in common with the middle-class university graduates who conquered those parties.
During her campaign for party chairmanship, Schlein proclaimed in a speech: “I’m a woman, I love another woman and I’m not a mother, but that doesn’t make me any less of a woman. We are not living wombs, but human beings with rights.’ It was a statement deliberately constructed similar to what Meloni said in a 2019 speech against progressives: “I’m Giorgia! I am a woman. I’m a mother, I’m Italian and I’m a Christian, you’ll never take that away from me,” she explained. “Family is their enemy, national identity is their enemy, gender identity is their enemy. They want us to be Parent One, Parent Two, LGBT Parents, Citizen X, Codes. But we are not codes. We are human beings.’
In her victory speech on Sunday, Schlein said she was “given a mandate to change people, methods and vision.” This commitment contains nuances of the notorious advice given by the most influential French Socialist Party think tank, Terra Nova, in 2011: “The France of tomorrow will be united above all by cultural and progressive values,” she proclaimed. “It wants change. It is tolerant, open, optimistic and inclusive…it opposes an electorate that defends the present and the past against change.”
The Socialists followed this strategy and a decade later the party is no longer a credible political force; Her candidate in last year’s presidential election, Anne Hidalgo, received just 616,000 votes, nearly two million fewer than Eric Zemmour, whose right-wing party has been in existence for just six months.
Schlein has not learned any lessons from the collapse of the French Socialists, the Swedish Social Democrats or the struggles of the British Labor Party in recent years. Posting her bid for the leadership, she boasted that her policies were “progressive, environmentally conscious and feminist,” which she described as an “alternative” to Meloni’s leadership.
It goes without saying that Schlein will receive the love and attention of the overwhelmingly liberal left-wing Western media, and already there has been a spate of tearjerkers comparing her to New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “neo-fascist” was compared “meloni. Incidentally, the latest issue of the New European newspaper has a feature on women politicians and the battles they still face because of their gender. Arden features prominently, as does Nicola Sturgeon and Sanna Marin, the centre-left Prime Minister of Finland. Meloni was not mentioned once in the article.
The bien pensants of the West still can’t bring themselves to speak their names, just as they can’t face the fact that their progressive dogma appeals to only a small minority of European voters.
As Schlein will soon find out.
