In recent weeks, newspapers and TV stations have dealt extensively with Elly Schlein, a former European parliamentarian from the Democratic Party and now vice-president of the Emilia-Romagna region. According to several observers, the list with which it presented itself to the regional ones, Coraggiosa, was decisive to attract thousands of voters to the left of the PD and in essence to win the center-left, while before and after the election campaign it was noted respectively with a video in which he faces Salvini on the management of migrants and a television interview by Daria Bignardi in which came out. Some foreign newspapers have also started to take an interest in her, including Associated Press, Politic and the País, that he defined it «The new star of the Italian left».
For some years Schlein’s name has been a rather well-known name for those involved in politics, especially in the circles included between the most radical wing of the Democratic Party and the small parties that are on its left.
Schlein (reads Shlain) was born in Lugano, Switzerland, is 34 years old and has a rather turbulent family history behind her. Her maternal grandfather was Agostino Viviani, partisan and then respected senator of the Socialist Party. The paternal grandfather instead emigrated to the United States from Lviv, which is now in Ukraine, to escape persecution against the Jews. Schlein arrived in Italy at the age of 19 and settled in Bologna, where he studied law. These are the years in which she became politically active: she was twice elected to the faculty council as a student representative, and in 2008 she participated as a volunteer in the last period of Barack Obama’s election campaign to become president of the United States.
In 2011 Schlein graduated in law with a thesis on foreign prisoners in Italian prisons. After a short career as a film journalist, in 2013 he became the most recognizable face of OccupyPD, a movement mainly made up of young party activists who opposed the possibility of a “broad agreement” government with the center-right. Schlein stood out so much that he managed to enter the national direction of the party, in the quota reserved for people close to Pippo Civati, and then to stand for the Europeans: in May 2014 he obtained 53 thousand preferences, a mountain of votes for a 29-year-old semi-unknown .
At the European Parliament, Schlein has mainly dealt with immigration, a theme that has followed since university. For two years Schlein was the speaker of the Socialists to the reform of the Dublin regulation, the legislative bottleneck that forces tens of thousands of migrants activated in Italy to remain in Italian territory for years. Together with colleagues from the center-right and the Liberals, Schlein found a compromise to modify the regulation by making the relocation of migrants automatic to other European countries, but the final proposal of the European Parliament was never approved by the Council of the EU, i.e. the body where representatives of the various national governments sit, mainly because of opposition from Eastern countries.
It was at that time that the disagreements between Schlein and the League began, which led to the video published by Schlein in January 2020. The reform was so delicate and complex that it absorbed the work of Schlein and the other European parliamentarians who worked on it for almost two years. , including Alessandra Mussolini for Forza Italia and Laura Ferrara for the 5 Star Movement. Yet at the 22 negotiating meetings – that is, those in which the speakers of the individual parties dealt with the main points of the proposal – never represented any representative of the League, who instead repeatedly argued that European immigration laws should be changed.
Most likely the League decided not to participate because in the European Parliament the most institutional forces refuse to collaborate with far-right parties, in the logic of the so-called “Sanitary cordon”. Schlein, however, had repeatedly invited the League’s parliamentarians to offer their contribution, and both publicly and privately she said she was repeatedly amazed that they did not, only to then attack the European Union for not helping Italy sufficiently. Schlein had never been able to ask Salvini publicly about it until a few weeks ago, when she met him by chance in San Giovanni in Perisceto, in the province of Bologna. The video of their meeting got half a million views on Twitter and was filmed by all the major newspapers and TV stations.
Finally, after years of asking the same question to Salvini without answers, I asked him face to face yesterday evening. Why did you never come to Brussels to the 22 negotiating meetings on the most important migration reform for Italy?
You judge the answer. @CoraggiosaEr pic.twitter.com/0nH3UZDDHA– elly schlein (@ellyesse) January 21, 2020
It was the first time in years that Schlein managed to get people talking about it in national newspapers and TV. Once elected, with rare exceptions, Italian European parliamentarians enter into a kind of shadow cone within which they are called only by morning talk shows and specialized programs. Six years have passed, to say, between Schlein’s penultimate and last appearance in Half past eight, the popular La7 talk show hosted by Lilli Gruber.
Despite the few appearances in newspapers and TV, which are still the most immediate tool of consent for a national politician, Schlein had attracted several attentions over time. Of the European parliamentarians elected in Italy, she was considered among the most effective in classroom interventions and above all among the best prepared – also thanks to an excellent group of collaborators and assistants – and her Facebook page has had a moderate success for years also thanks to the excerpts from his speeches in Parliament.
During his tenure, moreover, Schlein returned almost every week to Italy for rallies and political initiatives often aimed at young people, while in Brussels had decided to spend the budget that every European parliamentarian has available to let external institutions visit the European institutions to organize policy seminars for dozens of young people.
Among the Italian parliamentarians of the last legislature Schlein was by no means the most left – there was a small handful of parliamentarians elected with the impromptu movement The Other Europe with Tsipras – but the one that seemed more in tune with the electorate more young on some topics: he often repeated the need for a Europe that is more attentive to the environment, feminist issues, youth unemployment, respect for the rights of minorities and LGBT communities. Schlein is also a convinced federalist: that is, she belongs to the current of thought that the European institutions must assume an ever greater share of powers, subtracting them from the national states. “We need real European integration to respond to contemporary challenges,” he said recently in an interview with Associated Press.
The progressive increase in his personal consent was not accompanied by a career in traditional parties. In 2015 Schlein left the Democratic Party in controversy with the centrist turn imposed on the party by Matteo Renzi to join Possibile, the left-wing party founded by Pippo Civati, from which, however, it gradually moved away. In the months preceding the 2019 European elections he attempted a rather reckless maneuver to try to put together a unitary left-wing list that presented itself as a project “fresh in language, innovative in methods, content and even faces”, as he wrote on his blog, making it clear that otherwise she would not have applied again. In fact, she did not, despite the fact that towards the end of her mandate the new PD secretary Nicola Zingaretti explicitly asked her to return to the party and come back to the European elections.
The video of the Konrad festival meeting with Elly Schlein and Piercamillo Falasca, last April
The choice not to apply again left several observers perplexed, but Schlein explained that she would not feel at ease either on one of the various lists to the left of the PD or within the party itself, which she had abandoned for four years now: «I didn’t want to and I could not make choices that would, on the contrary, be extremely divisive, even between the people and realities with whom I worked side by side “, he wrote again on his blog.
In the weeks following the European elections Schlein started working on the list with which she would present herself in the regional elections in Emilia-Romagna: Brave was started in early November, and from that moment Schlein spent the following weeks around the region to campaign. Her list obtained 81,419 votes, that is 3.77 percent of the total, and Schlein was the candidate with the highest personal consent thanks to 22,098 preferences. In the new regional junta, Schlein will have the delegation to Welfare and the “Climate Pact”.
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