Elly Schlein

Elly Schlein (2014)

Elena Ethel "Elly" Schlein (born May 4, 1985 in Lugano , Ticino ) is an Italian politician ( PD , Possibile ). She was a member of the European Parliament from 2014 to 2019 .

Life

Schlein is the daughter of two university professors, her mother is Italian and her father is American. The anti-fascist resistance fighter and Senator Agostino Viviani was her grandfather. Her older brother is the mathematician Benjamin Schlein . She went to school in Lugano, Switzerland. She completed her law degree at the University of Bologna in 2011 with a thesis on constitutional law.

For the US presidential election in 2008 , she worked as an election campaign assistant for Barack Obama . In 2011 she was one of the founders of the Progrè student association in Bologna. From 2013 she got involved with the Partito Democratico . As part of the #OccupyPD campaign, she called for as many positions in the party as possible to be filled with young, left-wing members who opposed the Letta government's “grand coalition” . In the open area code of the PD chairman, she supported Giuseppe Civati's candidacy , but Matteo Renzi was defeated.

In the 2014 European elections , Schlein was elected to the European Parliament on the list of PD in the constituency of north-east Italy . There she belonged to the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Social Democrats (S&D), was deputy chair of the delegation for the Parliamentary Stabilization and Association Committee EU-Albania and a member of the Committee on Development . As a critic of the party chairman and Prime Minister Renzi, she resigned from the PD in July 2015 and joined the new Possibile party initiated by Civati , which positions itself on the left of the PD. In the European Parliament, however, she remained a member of the S&D group and also retained her committee posts. In the European elections in 2019 , they did not come for re-election.

On January 26, 2020, she was elected to the Emilia Romagna Regional Council, receiving a total of 22,098 preference votes (Bologna 15,975, Reggio Emilia 3,896 and Ferrara 2,227). She was a candidate on the list “Emilia Romagna coraggiosa”, which was formed by the party groups “Articolo Uno”, “Sinistra Italiana”, “èViva” and “realtà politico-associative locali”. She was the candidate with the most preferential votes in the entire region, ahead of candidates from the larger parties.

Web links

• Entry on Elly Schlein in the database of Members of the European Parliament