Elly Schlein started her bid for the Democratic Party leadership 20 points behind. She won it anyway, unexpectedly, in 2023. Now the 41-year-old Italian opposition leader, a socialist, wants to unseat Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in national elections that must be held before the end of 2027.
Last week Donald Trump took a swipe at Meloni on social media, claiming she “begged” him for a photo op. She answered that the idea was ridiculous. American progressives may have enjoyed it, but it hides the larger picture. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy partly traces its roots to Benito Mussolini’s old party, and her coalition’s other two strands come from Silvio Berlusconi’s camp and a more ordinary conservative party. She may also have to ally with a hard-right party that is gaining ground. With Viktor Orban voted out in Hungary, the source of this account calls Meloni the most important right-wing leader in Europe.
An unlikely leader
Schlein was raised in Lugano, Switzerland, by a Jewish Ukrainian American father and an Italian mother. She holds American, Italian and Swiss citizenship, studied at the University of Bologna, and volunteered twice for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. She is gay. She built her base in left-wing movement politics outside the traditional party structure.
“When I was elected, we had just hit our historically lowest in the polls,” she said in an interview at the party’s Central Rome headquarters. “There were many people betting on the end of the party or a split.” She says she set out to rebuild credibility on defence of the public health care system, a minimum wage and the fight against precarious jobs.
The Democratic Party is an amalgam of older parties, among them the former Communist Party, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats. It leads a coalition of smaller parties that disagree on foreign policy and defence spending, and Schlein has to hold them together. 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,” Professor Marc Lazar of Rome’s Luiss University said. Her party has not won a national election since 2016.
The economy and Albania
Italy is Europe’s third-largest economy but one of its poorer nations. It depends on exports, and it has been hit by Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war. Wine, pasta, olive oil and fashion all rely on the U.S. as their largest market. Most of the country’s imported gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz.
“After four years of Meloni, our growth rate is at zero,” Schlein said. She accuses the government of expanding privatization of health care, privatizing higher education and growing the casual workforce.
On migrants, she calls the Albania detention centres a failure. “She said they would host asylum-seekers in these centers, 36,000 migrants a year,” Schlein said. Her figure from the Italian president’s office is “536 migrants in two years.” After European courts ruled that Meloni’s government could not wholly reject asylum-seekers inside Italy, she says, the government moved already detained migrants to Albania instead of admitting defeat.
Schlein lists five priorities: health, education, decent jobs, industrial policies, and digital and ecological transition, with renewable energy gains redistributed.
Defence, Europe and Ukraine
She would not have given in to Trump’s demand that NATO allies spend 5 percent of GDP on defence. Meloni, she argues, should have followed Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who stayed loyal to the alliance without conceding. On Ukraine she says Italy should keep backing Kyiv, and that no just peace can be negotiated without Ukrainians at the table.
She also wants a European research centre across the 27 EU countries on AI. “What can France, Italy, Spain, or Germany do alone when you have 500 billion investment on AI in the U.S. and 500 billion investment from China?” she asked.
Two women, one contest
A national campaign between two women is unprecedented in patriarchal, Catholic Italy. Meloni often says, “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” Schlein’s answer: “I am a woman. I love another woman. I am not a mother, but I am not less of a woman for this.”
Support for same-sex unions hit a high of 80 percent in one 2025 poll, yet Italy remains the only Western European country where same-sex marriage is not legal.
In March, Meloni lost a vote on changing the Italian Constitution to reduce the judiciary’s role. Turnout among young people reached 67 percent, and Schlein credits an “intergenerational bridge” with voters over 60.
Sources
Sources
- Italian elections: Meloni gets to work on picking right-wing government
- Google News – News about Giorgia Meloni – Overview
