Elly Schlein won the primaries of the Democratic Party surprisingly defeating the other candidate for the secretariat, Stefano Bonaccini, current president of the Emilia Romagna Region.
“Congratulations and good luck to Elly Schlein”, Bonaccini said in his speech to the electoral committee in Bologna: “The first thing I ask is to give Elly Schlein a round of applause, I heard her and congratulated her, good luck for the great responsibility she assumes at the helm of the party. She was more capable than me in giving the sense of a renewal of the party. Starting tomorrow we all have to lend a hand to relaunch the Democratic Party, we feel the responsibility to make ourselves available, we have to lend a hand to Elly. I’ve always said: if I had won I would have asked Elly to give me a hand, Elly prevailed and without asking anything for me I’m ready to lend a hand”.
In his programme, Schlein also pays attention to the school: “Inequalities are tackled starting from school which is the first form of social emancipation, but to do so it is also necessary to support those who do valuable work and increase teachers’ salaries. On this aspect, the Pnrr can also help us to give greater dignity to teachers and to fight social inequalities”.
It’s still: “One cannot speak of merit before having guaranteed everyone equal opportunities and rights of access to quality education. An education that starts from the earliest years of life and extends compulsory education to 18 years of age. We need to reduce the number of boys and girls in classes and expand full-time”.
Elly Schlein’s profile
Elly Schlein born in 1985 in the canton of Ticino, in Switzerland, to university professor parents, the father of American Ashkenazi Jewish origins and the mother daughter of a well-known anti-fascist lawyer and senator of the Socialist Party in the seventies, Schlein has spent most of his life in Italy.
After graduating from Lugano, she moved to Bologna, her mother’s country of origin, where she studied at the University of Bologna, first at the Department of Performing Arts and Sciences and later at the Faculty of Law. where he graduated with a thesis on the representation of migrants in prison. During her studies, Schlein also participated as a volunteer in Barack Obama’s two election campaigns for the presidency of the United States.
After the experience of OccupyPd and the support of Pippo Civati in the 2014 congress, Schlein ran for the European Parliament, where she mainly dealt with immigration, tax justice, the environment and the fight against mafias. After having distanced herself from the Democratic Party during the Renzian era, she helped found the “Possibile” movement. In 2020, she ran as leader of a left-wing list in support of Stefano Bonaccini, her opponent in the Pd primaries.
Schlein was subsequently appointed vice president of the Emilia-Romagna Region and, in 2022, she was called by Enrico Letta to lead the opening up of the Democratic Party lists to the progressive world, becoming a member of the Chamber of Deputies.
Now the new challenge, at the head of the Democratic Party.