The New York Times consecrates Elly Schlein: “The woman who shakes Italian politics”

America looks to the new secretary of the Democratic Party. And it does so with an article published today on New York Times entitled “The woman who shakes up Italian politics (and no, she’s not the new prime minister)”. To steal the show from the premier in the prestigious US newspaper is Elly Schlein which, according to the newspaper, “wants to relaunch the centre-left opposition a Giorgia Meloniif his party can survive”.

For the correspondent from Rome of the NYT, Jason Horowitz, in Italy “it is difficult to embody change in Italy more than Mrs. Schlein” and with her victory, she adds, the new dem secretary “catapulted Italy, which for a long time seemed like a country for old men, into a clearly different territory. A female opposition leader is now pitted against a female prime minister.” Two antagonists who for the journalist “couldn’t be more different”. And he writes it by listing their personal and political confrontations, including Schlein’s accusation of Meloni of inflaming her base with “inhumane” and “illegal” policies that make it more difficult to save migrants at sea.

But in drawing Schlein’s portrait, the New York Times he does not forget the difficulties that the dem leader could find within the party, above all due to the currents that agitate the Democratic Party. In the same way, the article turns the spotlight on the possible alliance between the dem and the 5 Stars, while also analyzing the positions of the two parties on the war in Ukraine and recalling that Schlein’s grandfather was from Kiev.

The journalist specifies that Schlein describes his party as totally in support of Ukraine against Russia’s “criminal invasion” and underlines that the Democratic Party has voted to send arms again this year “because it is now necessary”. Ukraine’s supporters, however, the paper continues, are concerned about its pacifist pledge and what some see as its naïve argument that Europe must somehow convince China to force Russia to end the war. .

But Schlein explains to the nyt who feels a personal connection to Ukraine. His grandfather was Ukrainian, he recalls, and after emigrating to the United States and settling in Elizabeth, New Jersey, his family was almost certainly wiped out in the Holocaust. His Italian grandfather, who became a socialist parliamentarian, refused to wear the “black shirts of the fascists” during his graduation and was “an anti-fascist lawyer” who “defended the Jews in trials”. That family history, he insists, has made her highly sensitive to “what nationalism has brought to the European continent,” arguing that “this war is Putin’s nationalist war.”

Schlein, according to the newspaper, is sensitive to “what nationalism has brought to the European continent”. Furthermore, the fact that she is a “woman”, an “LGTBQI+ person” and “very proudly the daughter of a Jewish father” makes her a prime target “from the far right or even the far left at times”.