Centre-left opposition Democratic
Party (PD) new leader Elly Schelin is a self-confessed nerd who
loves music and films and is seen as an equally down-to-earth
challenge to rightwing Premier Giorgia Meloni, despite
upper-class intellectual origins.
Named after her two grandmothers, one a Tuscan woman with
leftwing politics in her blood and the other a Ukrainian
immigrant to the United States, Elena Ethel Schelin, 37, is the
Swiss-educated daughter of two university lecturers.
Schlein, who has openly stated she is a bisexual who lives with
a woman, is expected to wage campaigns on identity politics such
as LGBTQI+ rights, gay marriage and automatic citizenship for
children born in Italy to foreigners, as well as traditional
working class and leftist priorities.
She is seen as considerably farther Left than her defeated rival
and Emilia-Romagna Governor Stefano Bonaccini, who had been the
hot favourite to get the job after winning the vote among PD
chapters by a wide margin.
Schlein's father is a Jewish American political scientist at
Zurich University whose family hails from the Ukrainian city of
Lviv, and her mother an Italian law professor.
She grew up in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and has
triple nationality. She worked on Barack Obama's election and
re-election campaigns. where she learned about the importance of
grassroots organizing.
She studied theatre and then law, in which has a degree, during
formative years in Bologna. where she now lives with her
partner, who "is not a political figure and does not want to
become one".
She has two older siblings: Benjamin who teaches maths at the
university of Zurich, and Susanna, a diplomat at the Italian
embassy in Greece who recently suffered a firebomb attack by
anarchists protesting the tough prison regime of their
huger-striking leader Alfredo Cospito.
She has played down her Jewish roots to a degree and even said
her nose is 'Etruscan' rather than Jewish.
Plain-speaking Schlein is seen as an antidote to the equally
straight-talking Roman Meloni, who at 46 is nine years her
senior.
She is a self-declared nerd who often references videogames like
Monkey Island, a cinema buff who has frequented the Locarno Film
Festival from a young age, has worked on a documentary on the
Albanian exodus that won a Davide di Donatello Award, the
Italian Oscar, and is a great fan of music who plays the guitar
and shows equal love for high-brow singer songwriters and the
sometimes kitschy Sanremo Song Contest.
A natural polyglot, when she was an MEP she made a point of
greeting fellow members of the European Parliament in their
native tongue.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
