When Elly Schlein ran for the leadership of Italy’s Democratic Party, she began 20 points behind. Nobody expected her to win in 2023, and she did. “When I was elected, we had just hit our historically lowest in the polls,” she told The New Republic. “There were many people betting on the end of the party or a split.”
Now the 41-year-old leads the Italian opposition, and she wants Giorgia Meloni’s job. Italy has to hold national elections before the end of 2027.
An unlikely front-runner
Schlein is a gay woman with a Jewish Ukrainian American father and an Italian mother. She grew up in Lugano, Switzerland, holds American, Italian and Swiss citizenship, and studied at the University of Bologna, where she got into left-wing movement politics. She also volunteered twice on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. The magazine’s writer, who spent nearly two hours with her at party headquarters in central Rome, described her as warm, wonkish and unpretentious, and said she talked through a range of subjects without notes.
Her party is a patchwork. It grew out of the former Communist Party of Italy, the Socialist Party and the Christian Democrats. Today it is the biggest member of a coalition of smaller parties, and Schlein has to keep them in line, above all on foreign policy and defense spending.
Her weak spot sits outside the cities. Professor Marc Lazar of Rome’s Luiss University said her core support comes from the intellectual elite in big cities rather than working-class voters. “It’s a huge problem for them to speak to the voters who are living in the small cities in the rural zone,” he said. Her party has not won a national election since 2016.
Two votes, two readings
The last few months gave her something to cheer and something to worry about. In March, Meloni lost a referendum on changing the constitution to reduce the judiciary’s role. Schlein credits “an intergenerational bridge”: young voters turned out at 67 percent, alongside voters over 60. Then came municipal elections in late May, where the right mostly fended off the left and picked up significant wins in Venice and Reggio Calabria.
Meloni at home
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy partly descends from Benito Mussolini’s old party. Her partners include a strain from Silvio Berlusconi’s camp and a more conventional conservative party. Schlein calls her record on Albania a case study. Rome’s plan to hold asylum-seekers in centers there was promised at 36,000 migrants a year, and Schlein says official data shows “536 migrants in two years”.
She also uses Meloni’s own slogan against her. Meloni tells crowds, “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” Schlein answers: “I am a woman. I love another woman. I am not a mother, but I am not less of a woman for this.” One 2025 poll put support for same-sex unions at 80 percent, though Italy remains the only country in Western Europe without same-sex marriage.
On policy she points to cuts to kindergarten funding and a blocked proposal for five months of paid parental leave for both parents. Technology is another front. She has praised Pope Leo’s latest encyclical on the risks of unregulated progress, and wants a European AI research center spanning the 27 EU countries. “Otherwise, we’re out of the game,” she said.
