Italy's centre-left Democratic Party elects first woman leader

Italy's Democratic Party elected its first woman leader at the weekend, charged with re-energizing the centre-left party to counter a recent surge in popularity of the right.

Parliamentarian Elly Schlein, 37, defeated frontrunner Stefano Bonaccini, president of the Emilia-Romagna region, by 53.8 per cent to 46.2 per cent Sunday, in an election that saw most left-leaning voters stay at home.

Schlein becomes the youngest-ever leader of the progressive, pro-Europe party, which many political experts have seen as suffering from an identity crisis amid the increasing popularity of far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party.

Ahead of official figures, the PD estimated that around one million supporters took part in the primaries, which would mean that Sunday's election had the worst-ever abstention rate of internal PD elections.

Schlein succeeds Enrico Letta, a former prime minister, the head of the party since March 2021 who resigned after general elections in September that brought Meloni and her right-wing coalition to power.

The PD, hurt by a divided left and a negative election campaign that failed to inspire voters, won just 19 per cent of the vote in the general election versus 26 per cent for the Brothers of Italy.

According to an ixé poll conducted from 15 to 21 February, the PD currently stands at 16.9 per cent of voting intentions, far behind Brothers of Italy at 31.1 per cent and just below the anti-establishment Five Star Movement at 17.2 per cent.

Born in Lugano, Switzerland within the country's Italian-speaking region, Schlein's father is American with Ukrainian Jewish ancestry. Her mother is Italian.

With a law degree from the University of Bologna, she left Italy in 2008 to work on former US President Barack Obama's election campaign, and later his re-election campaign.

Elected into the European Parliament in 2014, she became vice-president of the Emilia-Romagna region in 2020 before entering Italy's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, in 2022.

Schlein rarely talks about her private life, but in an interview in 2020 she said she was bisexual and in a relationship with a woman.

The left-wing Domani daily wrote Monday that Schlein offered "a model of feminine leadership radically different to that of Giorgia Meloni", who defined herself during the general election as a Christian mother.