Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: Italy’s Democratic Party (PD) elected Elly Schlein, 37, as its first woman leader at the weekend, who is charged with re-energizing the center-left party to act against a recent surge in the right’s popularity.
In an upset, parliamentarian Elly Schlein defeated frontrunner Stefano Bonaccini, who is Emilia-Romagna region’s president, by 53.8 percent to 46.2 percent Sunday. In the election, most left-leaning voters stayed at home.
Amid the rising popularity of far-right PM Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party, Schlein becomes the youngest-ever leader of the pro-Europe, progressive party, which a number of political experts have seen as going through an identity crisis.
Prior to the official figures, the PD estimated that around 1 million supporters took part in the primaries, which would make Sunday’s election the worst-ever abstention rate of internal PD polls.
Schlein replaces Enrico Letta, a former prime minister, who has been the party’s head since March 2021 and resigned after the general elections in September 2022 that brought Meloni and her right-wing alliance to power.
Hurt by a fractured left and a negative poll campaign that failed to inspire voters, the PD, won just 19 percent of the vote in the general election as compared to 26 percent for the Brothers of Italy.
As per an ixé poll conducted from 15 to 21 February, the PD at present stands at 16.9 percent of vote intentions, far behind Brothers of Italy at 31.1 percent, and behind the Five Star Movement at 17.2 percent.
Elly Schlein worked on former US president Barack Obama’s campaigns
Schlein was born in Lugano, Switzerland which is within the country’s Italian-speaking region, and her father is an American citizen with Ukrainian Jewish ancestry while her mother is Italian.
After finishing a law degree from the University of Bologna, she left Italy in 2008 to work on former US president Barack Obama’s election campaign, and later his campaign for re-election.
