On the eve of last autumn’s crushing election defeat for Italy’s Democratic party (PD), one of the party’s youthful rising stars addressed a cri de coeur to a rally in Rome. “I am a woman,” said Elly Schlein, “I love another woman and I am not a mother, but I am no less a woman for this.” The words were a clever liberal rejoinder to Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who had famously signalled her social conservatism on LGBT+ rights and abortion with the formulation: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian.”
This weekend’s surprise election of Ms Schlein as the first female leader of the PD ensures that this radical clash of perspectives – along with similarly clear blue water on inequality, the green transition and the migration crisis – is now front and centre in Italian politics. A startling turn of events, for a previously moribund centre-left it is also a potentially galvanising one.
