Writing about oneself is sometimes a tactic to get from the story of intimacy to the political message and other times to divert attention to a more convenient side, to tell one’s own version of what happened. The opportunity to turn the feat of power into a book that generates interest and curiosity in the voter is a strategy that few politicians, especially those who achieve meteoric fame, miss. An art elevated to the nth degree if we take it to Italian politics, where ‘storytelling’ is fundamental and dialectic is a trade learned from figures like the former prime minister. Silvio Berlusconi, expert in creating his own caricature of himself. The last to do so is the leader of the Italian opposition, who won the party primaries thanks to the votes of those registered in February 2023 in a completely unexpected way, and who now tells herself in a conversation with journalist Susanna Turco titled ‘L’imprevista’ and edited by Feltrinelli (La unprevista).
Unknown to a large part of Italians, ignored within their political formation, the Democratic Party, the main left-wing party in Italy that in recent years has been increasingly disenchanting its voters with internal fights and political inactivity. Elly Schlein focused her strategy on presenting herself as the antithesis of Giorgia Meloni and reformulated her hit “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian and they can’t take that away from me.” She said she was a woman, she was not a mother and no less of a woman for that reason, and that she loved another “donna.” The successive elections were merciful to it and allowed it to remain as the second party and stop losing votes, the main objective of any general secretary in the PD. For the rest he occupied himself with traveling throughout Italy and meeting people, without saying much about them. She broke the silence with this book in which she brings closer to the voter, the 39-year-old woman who aspires to be a real rival for Giorgia Meloni, who for now remains unbeatable in the polls.
With extensive experience in left-wing activism and with the knowledge in migration policies that her time in the European Parliament gave her, Elly Schlein says she has always fought for what she believed to be social justicewithout setting the goal of getting where he did. In this book she shows her most personal side: from the geeky girl she was in the 90s, a lover of video games and a movie buff, to the daughter of university professors, born in the Italian part of Switzerland but a citizen of Bologna for almost all of her adult life. . She always dreamed of being a film director, but the atmosphere of the so-called red city, strongly linked to the left, dragged her along. When she was a student on the streets of Bolognese, Giorgia Meloni was already the youngest minister of the Italian Republic.
In the book there are some almost unreal anecdotes, such as one morning in 2009, when he was a student in Bologna, in which he decided to go for a run to reconnect, after all night of partying, and met former Prime Minister Romano Prodi. He joined him and started talking about a news story he had read that same morning about Matteo Salvini. It is inevitable to think that there was a policy in her, but… Is there a leader? That is the question we have asked the political scientist from the University of Bologna, with extensive experience as a columnist in various Italian newspapers, Sofia Ventura. “This book brings you closer to a young woman, who has touched politics in her experiencesbut it does not answer a question that I find very important when you want to focus on this: What event changed your life and made you think that you had to dedicate yourself to politics?”, he explains.
When Giorgia Meloni published her book, edited by Rizzoli, it soon reached 100,000 copies and it even reached five editions. The much closer format, like the story of a friend who tells her life, at a time when it was opening to a majority audience in Italy, made it a boom. It was also the step prior to becoming prime minister. In the book she is the one who gradually recounts each episode of her life until she tells how the murder of Paolo Borsellino, an anti-mafia magistrate murdered by Cosa Nostra in 1992, was like a “switch” that turned on in her the desire to do something to change things and completely determined his political vocation.
“For example, if I think of autobiographies of politicians that have hooked me, I think of that of Sarkozy in which he delves into his family historythe origins of a family of Greek Hebrews or the psychological wound after the breakup with his wife. Or also in the case of George Bush when he talks about his addiction to alcohol. In the case of Elly Schlein’s book, I need to tell more aspects of her daily life that hook the reader into the exciting life of a character on the front lines,” adds Ventura.
Personal books and sales
We could fill an entire bookstore with books about politicians and policies in Italy. There are top sellers, like former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who has seen his latest essay among the best sellers in Italy. Others, such as the Vice President of the Government and Minister of Infrastructure, Matteo Salvini, who update their books with the passing of events. Recently, he has added to his ‘Controvento’ (Against the Wind), published in April of this year, a new chapter after the Prosecutor’s Office requested 6 years in prison for having blocked a boat with 147 migrants for several days in 2019. “ Processo a un Italian” (Trial of an Italian) is a text of about ten pages in which he offers his own version of what happened. Especially controversial this year has been General Vannacci, famous for his racist and homophobic positions, elected as an MEP by Salvini’s League in these last elections, selling 250,000 copies of his book ‘Il mondo alcontra’ (The world to the contrary). . On many occasions, controversy and top sales go hand in hand, in others, as in the case of Elly Schlein and Giorgia Meloni, serve to see what is behind the two women protagonists of Italian politics of the moment.
