Her election stirred many waters. No one expected that Ellie Schlein, the new secretary of the Italian Democratic Party, would be elected to this position. Her radical stances—as she and others called them—didn’t bode well for the victory of the largely bogged-down centre-left party, which fell out of favor in the elections. Everyone expected Stefano Bonacini to win. However, Ellie Sline won 53.8% of the vote against 46.2% of her rival.

As if with acquired speed, everyone hurried to talk about the “anti-Meloni”, it is logical that both women. But that’s where the similarities between the two political leaders end. Ellie Schlein will not – if she does – prove to be just a counterbalance to the Italian premier, the new head of the Democratic Party has a past despite her 38 years, as evidenced by the waves of positive and negative reactions to her election, among those who rushed, she is compared to Jacinda Ardern , Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Sanoy Marin or … Jeremy Corbin.

And her past is not limited to her voluntary participation in the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, nor, moreover, her declared bisexuality. Her mileage has more to do with her exits than her entrances. Like, for example, her independence in the European Parliament in 2015, where she was elected from the Democratic Party, due, according to her, to the neo-liberal turn of the then head of the party and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Or when, in 2013, she launched the relentless OccupyPD as 101 MPs from her party and coalition refused to vote for Romano Prodi as President of the Italian Republic.

Her past — and her present — are also stigmatized by her rhetoric and activism. From his unwavering commitment to minorities, to the working class, to human and political rights, to his cosmopolitanism, it all creates turmoil and derisive understatement.

Her route

Eli Schlein was born in 1985 in Italian-speaking Lugano, Switzerland to an American father and an Italian mother (hence the triple citizenship). As she writes, she is of European heritage: her maternal grandfather, Agostino Viviani, was a lawyer from Siena and an ardent anti-fascist. Her paternal grandfather, Harry Sline, came from an Eastern European family who survived the tragedies of the 20th century and immigrated to the United States. Ellie Sline, as they say on her website, has a brother and a sister: they live in different countries of Europe.

Her sister, in fact, Susana Slane, is an adviser at the Italian Embassy in Athens, and we recently learned about her from an arson attack she got on her home in the Greek capital, fortunately only her car was the “victim”. Information still wants the motivation for the attack to be based on the anarchist movement’s opposition to the condemnation of the famous Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito.

After graduating from high school in Lugano and receiving an award for the best results in exams, Ellie Sline moved to Bologna and studied art, music and filmmaking. Lo won it a year later. In 2008, he decides to become part of the tectonic changes marked by the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States, leaves for Chicago, where he voluntarily joins his election campaign. “There I saw that they were not chasing votes, but mobilizing ideas,” in her own words. And this, it seems, was to become the center of her political position.

Since graduating from university in 2011, where her dissertation dealt with crime, immigrant overrepresentation in prisons, and alien rights in constitutional jurisprudence, Ellie Sline has been involved in human rights activists and has also published film reviews in newspapers and blogs. . At the same time, he participates in the Locarno International Film Festival. He worked on Roland Seiko’s documentary “Anija-La Nave” about the exodus of thousands of people from Albania to Italy. In 2013, he took a cinematic approach to the subject of the unclaimed Italian capital in Switzerland.

2014 is her year. She is a candidate for the European elections, the main axis of which is the social mobilization of working people and marginalized people. Her campaign has been named #slowfoot and is based on a sustainable future. On May 25, she was elected to the European Parliament with 54,802 votes and participates in most committees that affect her interests: rights, immigration, tax justice, environmental transformation, the fight against corruption and the mafia.

Exactly one year later, in May 2015, he became independent of the Democratic Party, remaining a member of the European Parliament, thanks to the educational and labor reforms promoted by Matteo Renzi. In June of the same year, together with friends and colleagues, she founded the Opportunity party. In 2017, she was awarded the MEP of the Year award for her contribution to development issues regarding immigration.

In the regional elections of January 2020, he is elected to the Legislative Assembly of Emilia-Romagna for the Coragiosa Party and is announced as vice president of the assembly and advisor for combating inequality and the ecological transition.

In the same year, she declares that she is bisexual. “I loved men, I loved women, now I’m happy with a girl,” she said. In fact, according to La Repubblica, he stated that “my father was unaware of the cigarette addiction, it took me longer to confess to him that I smoked than to reveal my sexual orientation to him.”

On the way to elections

She made headlines again last September when Enrico Letta resigned from the leadership of the Democratic Party, and she ran as an outsider, promising to “radicalize” her party and turn it into a “true left.” He usually said that he didn’t want leftists “who win debates at dinner parties but not elections.”

In an interview with the Guardian in September, she said she “couldn’t take it anymore” with the Democratic Party after Matteo Renzi’s labor reforms, which included measures to make it easier for employers to fire workers and hire others on what she called unreliable. contracts.

The main axes of her election program were the minimum wage, social security and the environment.

“We won, it’s a small big revolution,” she said when she was elected the first female leader of the Democratic Party last Sunday. “We will work together in the interests of the country. We will work for unity and I intend to be the leader of all to win again. The party should go in cycles in non-voters. Unfortunately, this mostly means low-income groups.”

“We are going to be a big problem for the government of Georgia Meloni. We will support the Italy that is fighting the most: the poor who are being attacked by the government,” she said, promising “roadblocks” against the proposed changes in welfare and health care.

In a direct confrontation with Meloni on the night of her election, Ellie Schlein said: “I am a woman, I love a woman, I am not a mother, but that does not mean that I am less of a woman,” responding to the Italian Prime Minister’s remark: “I am a woman, mother , Italian and Christian, and no one can take that away from me.”

Politico, however, in an x-ray of her election wrote that the newly elected leader defeated Bonacini in major cities such as Milan, Turin and Naples, while doing well in almost all places north of Rome, but losing in most cities. South, according to a YouTrend poll. “There was a wave of support that brought together different voters united by a strong desire for change,” Lorenzo Preliasco, founder of YouTrend, told the website. However, he downplayed reports of a “youth quake” and called the campaign “boring and largely ignored by the public”.

Reactions

Julia Blasi, a feminist writer and activist who supported Slane’s campaign, noted in the New Statesman that her victory, like her previous campaigns in the wealthy northern region of Emilia-Romagna, demonstrated her ability to “mobilize a diverse voter base.” Slaine is very clear about what she’s worth and has a much better understanding of what people want and need. I think that’s what the voters have reacted to – now she and the rest of the party should build on that.”

On the other hand, the right-wing newspaper Il Tempo called her “CommunistElli”, right-wing commentator Italo Bocchino took a more populist approach, stating that Slane would favor the weak and the poor, although she does not know what poverty is, “unlike Meloni”.

But Ellie Slane also got friendly fire. Founding Democratic Party member and former cabinet minister Giuseppe Fioroni told Politico that her platform has nothing to do with my history and political culture. “My Democratic Party no longer exists, it has become a different party – it is no longer centre-left, but far-left.”

However, the issue that many analysts say will be the most slippery of her political career is her stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She said that “we support Ukraine’s right to self-defense through any form of assistance. But as a pacifist, I don’t believe that weapons alone will end the war.”

According to Politico, her distant ancestors may come from a village near modern-day Lviv, but there are questions about whether she will continue to fully support her predecessor, Enrico Letta, in supplying weapons to Ukraine.