Italian-American emerges as new star of Italy's left-wing
BOLOGNA, Italy (AP) — A dual U.S.-Italian citizen who cut her political organizing teeth on two Barack Obama campaigns is emerging as the latest rising star in Italian politics.
Inside a week, 34-year-old Elly Schlein, a former European lawmaker who grew up in Switzerland, has gone from relative obscurity as a political operative to the face of Italy's new leftist forces.
That left-wing political front — also embodied by the grassroots protest movement Sardines — thwarted right-wing populist Matteo Salvini’s attempt to unseat the center-left regional government in the left's historic stronghold of Emilia-Romagna. The loss in the Jan. 26 regional vote also delayed Salvini's ambition to re-take power in Italy's national government.
Schlein’s visibility skyrocketed just days before the election when a video went viral of her confronting Salvini, Italy’s former firebrand interior minister, over his failure to show up for 22 negotiating sessions on migration policy when they both represented Italy as European Parliament members. He made her wait 80 seconds for a response while he looked at his phone, then asserted that he was present when it counted.
With just three months of campaigning for a place on Emilia-Romagna's regional council, Schlein won the most write-in votes in the region's electoral history. Her party, Emilia-Romagna Courageous, boosted the center-left Democratic Party incumbent’s 51% majority support by nearly 4%.
The stunning result has made Schlein’s political future the subject of national speculation.
She has been compared to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, for her unexpected rise and activist-outsider status. Strangers now stop Schlein to shake her hand as she walks through Bologna, the northern Italian city where she has lived for the past 15 years, including the five years she shuttled to and from Brussels as an EU lawmaker.
During a recent interview walking through Bologna’s famed porticoes, she was stopped multiple times. One passer-by praised her as "a marvel" and declared her the next leader of the Italy’s left. Another lobbied her to stop plans to route a tram through the city center — and then acknowledged she hadn’t gotten his vote because he hadn’t heard of her, just four days previously.
‘’Something has changed,’’ Schlein acknowledged.
Her success could give her leverage to ask for a key role in regional politics. It also has forced the head of the Democratic Party, Nicola Zingaretti, to field questions about a possible role for Schlein in the party, which she left in 2015 as part of an internal schism.
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