American progressives may have felt a twinge of sympathy or even support last week for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as she became the umpteenth target of one of Donald Trump’s churlish social media fusillades. Trump claimed she “begged” him for a photo op; she fired back that that was ridiculous.
It was amusing, but it was also a bit aberrational, because in general, the right-wing Meloni is Trump’s ideological ally. Instead, it’s the 41-year-old leader of the Italian Opposition (an official role), socialist Elly Schlein, whom progressives in the United States and elsewhere should be learning about. Schlein hopes to beat Meloni in Italian national elections, which must be held before the end of 2027.
We’re involved in a global battle between left and right, liberal democracy and populist authoritarianism. And the reality is that the global right has been much better at aligning together than the left. Steve Bannon is an architect of this, starting early in the first Trump term to organize international forces to do his bidding. With Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán felled by democratic forces in his own country, Meloni now stands as the most important right-wing leader in Europe.
The U.K. will elect a new prime minister this year. Italy will be the next big one. Meloni’s defeat in 2027, a year before the U.S. presidential elections, would send a powerful message to Republican leaders in the U.S. and to corporate interests so closely aligned with the right wing in Europe and here at home.
Schlein, who won her party’s leadership unexpectedly in 2023, is hardly the prototype of an Italian politician. A gay woman with a Jewish Ukrainian American father and an Italian mother, she was raised in Lugarno, Switzerland. She holds triple citizenship: American, Italian, and Swiss. She attended the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world, engaging there in left-wing movement politics as she built a base of support outside the traditional party structure before surprising the old guard with her leadership victory of the Partido Democratico (Democratic Party, or P.D.) three years ago.
She began that leadership campaign 20 points behind. “When I was elected, we had just hit our historically lowest in the polls,” she said in an interview. “There were many people betting on the end of the party or a split.” Schlein says she sought to “rebuild the credibility of the party on two basic issues: the defense of the public health care system and minimum wage, and the fight against precarious jobs.”
I sat with her recently on a sweltering early summer day in the Central Rome party headquarters, where we talked for nearly two hours as she covered a range of topics with no notes. The P.D. is an amalgam of previously large parties in Italy that includes the former Communist Party of Italy, or PCI; the Socialist Party; and the Christian Democrats (the latter two are former ruling parties, while the PCI was once the largest Communist party in the Western world). Today, the P.D. is the largest party in a coalition including smaller parties with diverse political positions that Schlein must corral to succeed, especially on foreign policy and defense spending.
Warm, wonkish, and unpretentious, Schlein is passionate about politics and ideology, weaving a narrative completely opposite to that of her nemesis, Meloni. Her international collaborators include Senator Bernie Sanders, Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula de Silva, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. She’s quite familiar with U.S. politics, having volunteered twice for Barack Obama’s presidential races.
Schlein’s base mirrors much of the Italian left (and much of the international left), with core support coming not from working-class voters but from the intellectual elite in the big cities. “It’s a huge problem for them to speak to the voters who are living in the small cities in the rural zone,” Professor Marc Lazar, of Rome’s Luiss University, told me. But capturing the working class and poorer sectors of Italian society from Meloni is a must for Schlein if she is to be victorious for a party that hasn’t won a national election since 2016.
Italy is Europe’s third-largest economy, yet it is also one of the continent’s poorer nations. Largely dependent on exports, it’s been hard hit by Trump’s tariffs policy and the Iran war. Think Italian wine, pasta, olive oil, and designer fashion—all of which rely on the U.S. as the largest market. The choice for producers is to earn less on each product or charge more.
But the most critical vulnerability for Italy’s economy is the mess created by Trump in the Strait of Hormuz, an avenue through which most of Italy’s imported gas flows. The Italian economy is overly dependent on natural gas imports.
All of this should make Meloni vulnerable for reelection in 2027. Her pro-market policies have proven problematic for Italy. She expanded privatization of Italy’s health care system, already one of the weakest public systems on the continent. She is privatizing higher education, expanding the casual workforce, and opening detention centers for migrants—though in Albania, not Italy, using outsourced Italian police.
This latter project of Meloni’s, according to Schlein, underscores Meloni’s ill-conceived policies. The somersaults she has turned to try to keep her initial idea intact would put Trump to shame. “Understand how she works with propaganda while facts are somewhere else,” Schlein told me. “She said they would host asylum-seekers in these centers—36,000 migrants a year. It was clearly against European law and the Italian Constitution.”
After the European courts ruled that Meloni’s government couldn’t wholly reject asylum-seekers inside Italy, Schlein said that Meloni, “instead of declaring failure,” moved already detained migrants from Italy to Albania. “With taxpayer money for her propaganda, she prolongs the suffering” and subcontracts the work at a much higher cost.
And the numbers are ridiculously low: “not 36,000 a year, but 536 migrants in two years,” Schlein said, quoting data from the Italian president’s office. “Since these detainees can’t be returned to their home countries directly from Albania, Italy will have to pay to have them come to Italy and then deport them,” she added.
Meanwhile, Schlein has her governing agenda ready with “five main priorities: health, education, decent jobs, industrial policies, digital, and the ecological transition, in a way that redistributes the benefits of renewable energies.”
Employment opportunities for Italian youth are minimal, as are incentives for women in the workforce. “After four years of Meloni, our growth rate is at zero,” Schlein says. “It’s the image of the complete failure of the economic and social policies of a right-wing nationalist government.… Progressives cannot accept this. We must readapt those rules to fight a new form of exploitation, especially of the young generation.”
It’s an understatement to point out that a national campaign between two women is unprecedented in heavily patriarchal, Catholic Italy. Meloni echoes the American right wing in promoting what she considers traditional family values (though she herself is separated from her former partner, with whom she had a daughter out of wedlock). She regularly touts: “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” Schlein’s retort is: “I am a woman. I love another woman. I am not a mother, but I am not less of a woman for this.”
It’s hard to say how well this riposte might play. Support for same-sex unions hit a high of 80 percent in Italy in one 2025 poll. And yet, Italy remains the only country in Western Europe where same-sex marriage is not legal.
Schlein will try to build her case more around policy than emotion. “The right wing talks a lot about the support of traditional families and traditional values,” she told me, “but they are cutting funds for kindergartens, and they blocked a proposal of the opposition that aims at having, like in other European countries, five months of paid parental leave for both parents.”
The digital economy and AI are also on Schlein’s mind, where she has an ally in another leader in Rome: Pope Leo. “I think this last Papal Encyclical … shows the risks of this unregulated progress of technology,” she said, referring to the pope’s recent forceful statement on technology and the global economy. She also wants to “ensure that the added value and benefits of technology are equally shared through society, and are redistributed, which is a fundamental word for the left and progressives in general.”
Schlein endorses an EU-wide platform on AI and digital, as a matter of “national security,” asking “what can France, Italy, Spain, or Germany do alone when you have 500 billion investment on AI in the U.S. and 500 billion investment from China?” She proposes a European research center, across the 27 EU countries. “Otherwise, we’re out of the game.”
Having served in the European Parliament, Schlein describes herself as “so passionate” about European federalism. “None of the big challenges we have ahead of us, including wars, inequalities, climate change, public health, different pandemics,” she believes, can be handled by one European country.
Schlein says that unlike Meloni, she would not have capitulated to Trump’s demand that NATO allies expand military expenditure to 5 percent of their gross domestic product, because it “will be the end of the economy and welfare of this country. Meloni should have done what [Spanish Prime Minister] Pedro Sanchez did and said, ‘I am loyal to the alliance. I will respect all the capacity objectives set by NATO,’ but not give in to Trump.”
Defense and military policies are precisely where Schlein must stealthily maneuver among the left coalition. There are internal contradictions among these parties, regarding pacifism, the willingness to be part of a European Defense Pact, and on strategy regarding Ukraine and Israel-Palestine.
Schlein told me: “We should continue to support Ukraine as we always did with Partido Democratico.… Putin has rewritten borders with the use of military force.… Trump is too sensitive … to the arguments of Putin. You cannot negotiate a just and lasting peace without the people who were criminally invaded sitting at the table.”
On the Middle East, Schlein tries to navigate a policy that defends both Israelis and Palestinians. “We were all happy about a ceasefire. But the problem we saw in the peace plan, so called, from Trump is that there were two important points missing—the end of the illegal occupation in the West Bank, and a clear perspective for the recognition of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.” She said Hamas “cannot be the future of Gaza” and that the Palestinian Authority “must go through reforms.” Meanwhile, “[Benjamin] Netanyahu and his extremist ministers,” along with Trump, must be held accountable for violating international law, she said.
So, can she defeat Meloni? Two recent elections offer a split analysis. Meloni suffered a major loss attempting to change the Italian Constitution in March to reduce the judiciary’s role. Schlein told me this vote succeeded with “an intergenerational bridge.” Young people who don’t turn out in force did this time at 67 percent, along with voters over 60, to defeat Meloni. It’s precisely the type of alliance Schlein needs to win in 2027. In municipal elections held in late May, however, the right largely held off the left’s challenges, with significant wins in Venice and Reggio Calabria.
But Schlein’s optimism and energy are contagious. Without doubt, she has mobilized a forlorn left. “The match is on. We are competitive,” she smiled. Importantly, she has expressed a willingness to run in a primary election with other parties in the alliance, assuming a victory will bring her greater credibility, and she believes “is the best solution for us to keep the coalition united.”
Before we parted, Schlein showed me her bracelet, “Testardamente Unitari,” meaning “Stubbornly United,” which she said she wears all the time, underscoring her determination. It’s the prerequisite she needs to beat Meloni, challenge Trumpian policies, and help stave off Steve Bannon’s dream of a MAGA-fied Europe.
