There is much excitement among western Europe’s chattering classes after Elly Schlein was elected the new leader of Italy’s left-wing Democratic party. It is the first time that a woman has led the Italian left. The Guardian quoted the 37-year-old as saying her party will now be ‘a problem’ for Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s conservative PM.

On the contrary. Schlein’s elevation to party leader is an electoral gift for Meloni, whose sex is the only thing she has in common with her new foe.

Schlein has not drawn any lessons from the collapse of the French Socialists

Meloni was raised by a single mum in a working-class district of Rome and supported herself working as a bartender and a nanny in her youth. Schlein was born in Switzerland to an American father and an Italian mother, both university professors. She settled in Italy aged 19 and read law at Bologna university; her website states that her thesis was on ‘the issue of overrepresentation of migrants in prisons and the rights of aliens in constitutional jurisprudence.’

Holding Swiss, Italian and US citizenship, Schlein worked as a volunteer on Barack Obama’s campaign trails in 2008 and 2012.

Arguably where Meloni and Schlein diverge most is their approach to the migrant crisis, which already this year has seen 14,104 migrants land on Italian soil, a 163 per cent increase on the same period in 2022. Meloni’s ambition is to stem the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean whereas last year Schlein rejoiced in the acquittal of a migrant activist on charges of aiding and abetting illegal immigrants. ‘Solidarity is not a crime!’ she tweeted.

These facts make Schlein the new darling of metropolitan millennials in the West, many of whom are still struggling to come to terms with the resignation last month of Jacinda Arden.

It was instructive that Schlein scored best in the leadership contest in the big cities, hoovering up votes from young left-wingers, but she came behind her rival, Stefano Bonaccini, in the rural south of Italy.

Will she be able to win back the six million voters who have abandoned the Democratic party in recent years? They left for the same reason that so many working-class voters have walked out on their traditional parties in Britain and France: because they no longer have anything in common with the middle-class university graduates who have captured these parties.

During her campaign to become leader, Schlein proclaimed in a speech: ‘I am a woman, I love another woman and I am not a mother, but that doesn’t make me any less of a woman. We are not living wombs, but people with rights.’ It was a declaration purposely similar in construction to what Meloni said in an address in 2019 attacking progressives: ‘I am Giorgia! I am a woman. I am a mother, I am Italian and I am Christian, you will never take that away from me,’ she declared. ‘Family is their enemy, national identity is their enemy, gender identity is their enemy. They want us to become parent one, parent two, LGBT parents, citizen X, codes. But we are not codes. We are people.’

In her victory speech on Sunday, Schlein said she had ‘received a mandate to change people, methods and vision.’ There is in this avowal shades of the infamous advice given to the French Socialist party in 2011 by its most influential think-tank, Terra Nova: ‘The France of tomorrow is above all united by cultural and progressive values,’ it pronounced. ‘It wants change. It is tolerant, open, optimistic and inclusive…it is opposed to an electorate that defends the present and the past against change.’

The Socialists followed that strategy and a decade later the party is no longer a credible political force; its candidate in last year’s presidential election, Anne Hidalgo, received just 616,000 votes, nearly two million fewer than Eric Zemmour, whose right-wing party had only been in existence for six months.

Schlein has not drawn any lessons from the collapse of the French Socialists, Sweden’s Social Democrats or the struggles of the British Labour party in recent years. When she launched her leadership bid, she boasted that her policies were ‘progressive, environmentalist and feminist’, what she described as an ‘alternative’ to Meloni’s leadership.

It goes without saying that Schlein will receive the love and attention of the West’s overwhelmingly liberal left media, and already there have been a flurry of puff pieces, likening her to New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and contrasting her to the ‘neo-fascist’ Meloni. Incidentally, the latest issue of the New European newspaper has a feature about female political leaders and the battles they must still fight because of their sex. Arden features prominently, as does Nicola Sturgeon and Sanna Marin, the centre-left PM of Finland. Meloni wasn’t mentioned once in the article.

The West’s bien pensants still can’t bring themselves to utter her name, just as they can’t face the fact that their progressive dogma appeals only to a small minority of European voters.

As Schlein will soon discover.