Marta Rullán |
Rome (EFE) for four months it has had a prime minister, the far-right Giorgia Meloni.
The election of Schlein, 37, from the most leftist and modern wing of the party and who will be appointed this Monday general secretary of the PD, has broken all the forecasts by awakening enthusiasm in left-wing voters: it represents a necessary change in a party leader of the opposition in clear decline and who hit bottom in the last generals, last September, when he did not reach 20% of the votes.
In those elections, Meloni swept away, who also symbolized an important change, as a woman and also for her 45 years then, below the average age of male politicians who until now have relegated the female sex to secondary spaces.
“For the first time, having two women at the head of the two main parties undoubtedly represents the overcoming of an invisible threshold but until now insurmountable in a political context that has always been strongly dominated by men, and macho,” Alberto Vanucci assures EFE. , Professor of Political Science at the University of Pisa.
This break in the “glass ceiling” of Italian politics is not only important for what it means today, but also for what it can promote in a society like Italy where there is still much widespread macho behavior.
The beginning of a “virtuous circle” in Italian politics
According to the latest report on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, Italy ranks 63 out of 146 countries surveyed, while in politics the data is not much better, at least historically.
In the last 25 years, there has been an average of about 4.5 female ministers per government, according to the Tortuga social studies think tank, while only 6.56% of the prime ministers, ministers and undersecretaries who have sworn in have been women.
For this reason, “his presence in high positions could start a ‘virtuous circle’ in Italian politics,” according to Vannucci.
“On the one hand, because with their successful example they can induce other women to mobilize in a political commitment until now considered above all a ‘male profession’; and then because their role of power can favor a selection process for a new ruling class that is more attentive to gender issues”, she explains.
However, she qualifies, “it is important – and on this issue perhaps Schlein, who is openly feminist, is more sensitive than Meloni – that her approach to politics reflects an open, inclusive and cooperative vision, that does not limit herself to reproducing an approach ‘macho’ and ‘testosteronic’ of politics with different protagonists, women instead of men”.
Italian society demands changes
What is clear today, and even more after the election of Schlein, the first woman to become the PD leader, is that Italian society shows a deep demand for change, something that both symbolically represent, although the new leader of the Italian opposition be “the greatest possible opposition to the Meloni model”.
Both come from a very different history, since the young leader of the PD comes more from social movements than from the structure of a party, unlike Meloni, a woman who has been linked to “traditional” politics since her youth and who has managed to make his formation, the ultras Brothers of Italy (FDI), the largest in the country.
“Where Meloni claims to be the bearer of Christian values, with the motto God, country and family as her reference, Schlein does so with a much broader model: recognition of civil rights, maximum openness to diversity in the field of gender,” he explains. to EFE Vannucci.
And “if Meloni defines herself as Italian, Schlein, as her name is seen, has a cosmopolitan, deeply European projection,” says the political scientist about the PD leader, Swiss by birth, with an American father and an Italian mother.
Without forgetting that the prime minister, in one of her most famous speeches, claimed that she was a mother, while Schlein “proudly defends not being one and having non-heterosexual sexual preferences.”
A direct opposition that nevertheless (or for that very reason) has catapulted Schlein to the top of politics with Meloni, who yesterday was one of the first to congratulate her: “I hope that the election of a young woman to lead the party can help to the left to look forward and not back,” he said.
