Leading the Right-Wing Government and Center-Left Opposition in Italy: Two Women in Power

It is said that Giorgia Meloni, head of the Italian government, won the last elections because she was the only one to refuse to join the executive unit of technocrat Mario Draghi. Five months later, Elly Schlein won the internship of the Democratic Party, the main force of the center-left, because Meloni had managed to install the Brotherhood of Italy, a post-fascist movement, in power. As a result, the government and the opposition are led by women.

Schlein was elected secretary general of the PD three weeks ago with almost 54% of the votes displacing the governor of Emilia-Romagna, Stefano Bonaccini, the favorite of the party leadership. She won in open primaries and with almost a million voters.

The new general secretary of the PD is a 37-year-old deputy, feminist and secular in a predominantly sexist and Catholic Italy. She’s a lesbian in a country that doesn’t have marriage equality, and she’s a progressive in a political culture that rewards Berlusconi or technocrats. Schlein is the opposite of Meloni and they see her as the ideal opponent of hers. The head of government has already gathered the right around her figure, while the PD leader has to do the same with the left.

In the September elections, the PD fell below 20% and the 5 Star Movement was left with just over 15% with a social agenda and thanks to the votes in the south of the country. Schlein needs some agreement with M5E or to recover the electorate that went to other parties or did not go to vote directly, guarantee the loyalty of the losers of the PD and avoid extremes.

«It is a generational change and at the image level. It is a facelift of the PD. You will have a lot of internal resistance if you apply more left-wing economic measures. But at the electoral level it will be positive for the PD because it implies stirring up the hornet’s nest. The M5E was eating the toast among the young and the precarious. When it comes to confronting Meloni it will be much better because she is much more charismatic than her predecessor. In the campaign, her few interventions were more commented and shared on social networks », explains the political scientist Jaime Bordel.

Francesca Staiano, PhD in International Studies from La Sapienza University in Rome, points out that Schlein seeks to “modify the Dublin Regulation so that the social and bureaucratic cost of immigration is distributed among all the countries of the European Union and to rewrite the Bossi Law -Fini of 2001, which puts immigration and security together and gives a negative stereotype to immigrants.

There can be no more contrast between Schlein and Meloni on this issue. The president of the government has just approved a decree that limits the rescue of migrants to NGOs such as Open Arms, Doctors Without Borders, Sea Watch or SOS Méditerranée. This week a ship with 47 people sank in the Mediterranean. One of the organizations claimed that the Italian authorities had been informed. But the leader of the Brotherhood of Italy has promised her electorate that she would not let in a single illegal immigrant.

«Meloni’s mandate is a double game. On the one hand, she presents herself as moderate and sensible, as an international head of state, due to her Atlanticism and her unconditional support for Ukraine and following the line of Draghi’s work. On that second side is the part in which she has managed to give certain pills to her far-right electorate, such as the decree that makes it difficult to rescue immigrants. She has not moderated, she is very intelligent and knows how to establish herself and that alarm bells do not go off in Europe. It presents itself as a reliable partner in what matters to Europe, which is energy, economic and military policy, “says Bordel.

Behind the scenes, there is no moderation for the leader who came out of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, created by followers of Benito Mussolini. «I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian and I am not ashamed. I am ashamed of a State that defends the rights of homosexuals », she shouted before becoming the head of government. Her Ministry of Family, Birth and Equal Opportunities is a gesture of impotence in the face of legal abortion. And she has just prohibited homosexual couples from registering their children in the civil registry.

This is where Schlein’s leadership is a provocation to Meloni and his allies Matteo Salvini and Berlusconi. “It is a very harsh attack on the rights of children, especially homoparental families,” denounced Schlein, who earlier parodied Meloni’s reactionary phrase. «I am a woman, I love another woman and I am not a mother. But that does not make me less of a woman », he declared during the campaign. The most recent Ipsos poll gives Meloni a 52% approval and Schlein 36%, with 30 not yet knowing her.

“Schlein seeks to formalize many precarious jobs. He also wants to end the informal agreements that put immigrants in jail and push the fight of the LGBT community and the euthanasia and regulation of cannabis. Regarding the environment, he wants to accompany each sector of the economy with an ecological transition that does not harm consumers », Staiano points out.

Now Schlein has to overcome the image of an educated and progressive young woman that the middle class in big cities like so much. Of an Italian mother and an American father, she was born in Switzerland and worked in the presidential campaigns of Barak Obama, while Meloni exploits the story of her daughter with an absent father raised in a poor neighborhood of Rome where she worked from a very young age. And with that story, the leader of the Brothers wins among the workers and the most impoverished sectors.

“I hope that the election of a young woman at the head of the PD can help the left to look forward and not back,” Meloni wrote on Twitter. Before the congress of the largest Italian union, CGIL, Schlein promised to fight for the minimum wage and fixed-term contracts “that condemn many young people and women in these countries to precariousness.”

Meloni, meanwhile, lamented that Italy has “lower wages than before 1990 when there were still no cell phones” and called for “putting companies and workers in a position to create wealth that affects everyone.” The head of government wants a tax reform to lower taxes and she just assumed she canceled the income for citizenship, a social aid for the unemployed and precarious workers. It shouldn’t be difficult for Schlein to exploit these contradictions, but Meloni has already warned that his project is long-term. «