The worst of Schlein’s youth. This is how the reformists are fleeing the Young Democrats

“The Young Democrats called me a fascist just because I’m voting ‘Yes’ in the referendum on justice – can you believe it?” Paolo – not his real name – a 17-year-old, cannot get it out of his mind as he recounts to "Il Foglio" the stages of his time in the PD’s under-30s association: “I have so much pent-up anger towards those people. I feel like throwing a table out of the window when I remember these things. They’d be better off changing their name: that party is becoming anything but democratic.” A silent purge is underway within the PD’s youth wing. These words aren’t used, of course. The vocabulary of political consciousness is employed instead. They say that someone ‘isn’t toeing the line’, that they’re ‘playing into the hands of the right’, that they’re, deep down, a fascist. They say this to those who vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum on justice. To those who don’t wear a keffiyeh. To those who remember Bettino Craxi without spitting on his memory. In this article, many of them speak out – many of those who have been spat upon. Across Italy. They recount how, under Elly Schlein, a party’s youth wing has been transformed into a small, intolerant church, with its own dogmas, its excommunications and the clenched fist as a symbol of faith.

Six months ago, the PD’s youth wing, the Young Democrats (GD), was still languishing in a basement at the Nazareno. Secretary Schlein found it on the brink of collapse; commissioner Lorenzo Innocenzi performed CPR on it. After a month of intensive care and rehabilitation, the congress arrived with a new national secretary: Virginia Libero. A single candidacy – indeed, a guaranteed one. Every effort was made to avoid a repeat of the debacle of 2020, when the youth congress organised in the early summer of the Covid pandemic produced an uncertain result and everything came to a standstill amid recounts and mutual accusations of fraud. The appointment of a commissioner, decided by Schlein years later, restored order and discipline to a youth wing that had become fragmented and quarrelsome, having survived for years solely thanks to its local branches scattered across Italy, which had carried on with their activities in complete autonomy.

And it is precisely within those circles that the fiercest conflicts have taken place. “On several occasions, I’ve had the impression I was dealing with extremists,” says a young Democrat from Rome. He prefers to remain anonymous, like so many of the voices we’ve spoken to. Partly because the secondary school and university environment in which the Young Democrats gather is small, and “in our faculty, we all know each other to some extent”. Partly because they try to keep their names as private as possible and avoid drawing attention to themselves in front of Marta Bonafoni, a Lazio regional councillor sent by Schlein to scout fresh talent within the youth wing, with a view to sending them to Parliament in 2027. In short: the struggle between reformism and left-wing radicalism is all well and good, but why risk having the door slammed in your face just for an interview?

“They don’t want us reformists and former Renzi supporters.” The reasoning follows the same patterns as when Matteo Renzi entered the Nazareno as the ‘scrapper’: a time when those speaking to us were still watching cartoons on the telly whilst sipping fruit juice through a straw. That 40 per cent achieved by the PD in the 2014 European elections under the former prime minister’s leadership convinced many young people to join the youth wing. “I joined when I was fourteen and have fond memories of the battles at secondary school and Renzi’s time as secretary. But then, in 2019, I went up to Rome for a session with the Young Democrats, and during a meeting they accused me of being right-wing simply because I’d expressed my admiration for Bettino Craxi. That was the year I decided to leave.” This is recalled by Gabriele Zammillo, from Puglia, born in 1999, who – not coincidentally – after leaving the PD joined the national secretariat of the Young Socialists as the representative for Southern Italy. But within the party circles, it takes even less to be labelled a reactionary. “It’s over the most unimaginable trifles that the worst arguments break out,” adds the other young reformist, a Renzi supporter from Rome, who recounts a specific incident: “In mid-2024, a young man – who was also not particularly inclined towards extremism – was accused of being right-wing for turning up at an executive committee meeting wearing a Ralph Lauren polo shirt costing around 60 euros. He was mocked for weeks, but most of the criticism came from people in Rome’s historic centre with staggering wealth. They’re still stuck in the 1970s, when simply going out in the wrong jacket was enough to be branded a fascist.” After all, he continues, “it’s easy in there to be immediately perceived as an outsider: all you have to do is avoid having your photo taken with a clenched fist.” It’s quite a fashionable practice in local Young Democrats circles, as can easily be seen from what they post on Instagram: raised fists in group photos at the pro-Palestine demonstrations in October (the hashtag #genocide is a must) but also within the branches themselves, where the rainbow Pride flag harmonises in colour with the Palestinian flag. “The most surreal thing is that the young man who was pilloried for that designer top is now a senior youth leader in Rome. Back in 2023 he was even in favour of nuclear power; today he’s changed his mind, renouncing his reformist views to further his career. Out of conformism. And many of my friends, who until the day before had Renzi’s book in their pockets, have abandoned their ideas just to gain a bit of power,” says a 25-year-old Roman who has just left the youth wing and is now heading towards that of Italia Viva: “When I joined the PD’s youth wing in 2019, there was still room for pluralism. Today, if you don’t think like the majority, you’re out. It’s like a madhouse.”

You mention opportunistic defections and the referendum on justice comes up. The separation of judicial careers is, first and foremost, a battle for the left. It was Giuliano Vassalli, a partisan and the architect of the new Code of Criminal Procedure, who championed it, but so too were the many members of the PD who signed the motion tabled in 2019 by Maurizio Martina to stand for the party leadership. It read: “The issue of the separation of careers appears unavoidable in order to guarantee an impartial and independent judge.” It should therefore come as no surprise that some PD members – both young and old – are openly expressing their support for Minister Carlo Nordio’s reform. “When I worked alongside right-wing forces in a political campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum, the Young Democrats called me a ‘big fascist’. They accused me of throwing the party to the winds,” Paolo continues. He joined the Young Democrats in 2023, before leaving in September 2025. It is the ‘big party’ itself that is setting a bad example, spreading the idea on social media that anyone campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum should be lumped together with the neo-fascists of CasaPound. The younger rank-and-file absorb this line and spit it back in the face of anyone with a different view. “Those in the ‘big’ party are indoctrinating the young people badly, leaving them with confused ideas. And in fact, it was impossible to have a serious discussion with them,” says Paolo: “Rather than a political organisation, it felt more like an after-school club or a group of schoolmates.” Very useful, though. “They’d call us to the Festa dell’Unità and to meetings just to make up the numbers, to hand out campaign material. We spent our nights putting up posters: we were just foot soldiers,” explains Domenico Chianese, who left the Young Democrats of Locri in 2022 after reaching the age limit. “But even that was political activity in the end. A young person who joins the youth wing gets involved, works their way up the ranks and perhaps finds fertile ground for their ideas.”

On foreign policy, however, there is little to discuss: the Young Democrats speak at length about anti-Zionism, genocide in Gaza, colonialism and apartheid in Palestine. Slogans shouted in the streets and then reiterated on social media, with a few excesses. In February, the Bergamo Young Democrats’ account posted the message “Better a pig than a Zionist”, a semi-quote from the famous line that Marco Pagot, the pig-like pilot, uses in Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso to decline the invitation to return to the air force: “Rather than become a fascist, I’d rather be a pig”. On social media, they defended the post: “This is not anti-Semitism. And anyone who insists on claiming otherwise has a very specific political agenda.” The young people from Bergamo had already made a name for themselves last November by demonstrating against the presence of Emanuele Fiano – a former PD MP, the son of an Italian Jew who survived the Holocaust and national secretary of Sinistra per Israele – at a meeting organised in Bergamo alongside Luciano Belli Paci and Gabriele Eschenazi. “Are these supposed to be the PD’s new recruits? Is anyone training them, guiding them, correcting them?”, Fiano himself asked in a letter to Il Foglio shortly after the controversy erupted. In the end, the post was deleted and replaced by a press release offering “sincere and unreserved apologies to all the people and communities hurt by our graphic”. There are those, however, who would not have backed down an inch: “That post shouldn’t have been deleted. It seemed excessive to me to condemn it, not least because anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism”. This was admitted, again anonymously, by a young PD member very close to the most left-wing wing of the youth organisation, the one involved in the “Una cosa di sinistra” project: a hybrid between a blog, a political faction and a think-tank, which promotes campaigns and initiatives throughout Italy. Within this project, young Democrats are making their contribution, as can be seen from the numerous videos on social media. There is Jacopo Augenti, secretary of the Young Democrats of Rome, who, speaking of entrepreneurs, says: “We must go back to calling them ‘bosses’”. Or take Lorenzo Pacini – a young councillor in Milan and a name being mooted as a successor to Beppe Sala – who exclaims into the microphone: “Being moderate is pointless!”, whilst the audience bursts into applause and shouts of relief (“Ooh!”), as if the call to “go back to being more combative” had finally arrived after such a long wait. If one were to be cynical, Virginia Libero’s first speech as secretary betrays a fairly clear agenda: “Now we’re here. The Young Democrats are an asset to the Party… er, the Democratic Party.”

Following her election at the national congress in Naples last November, the young Democrats cheered her on by singing ‘Bella ciao’. Fists raised to the sky, needless to say. There are those, however, who still harbour bad memories of the period immediately preceding this, when she was a member of Udu Padova, the university students’ association of which she was president. “Back then, in 2022, when rockets were starting to be fired from Gaza into Israel, as a member of the association I was fed up with hearing the usual anti-Semitic-style propaganda about ‘colonialist Israel’. I spoke out publicly to highlight the fact that more than two million Palestinian Arabs live in the Jewish state, emphasising the complexity of the situation,” recalls a former student from Veneto, who also prefers to remain anonymous. “The next day, they invited me to an aperitif under a pretext. There I met several leading figures from the association who, for an hour, asked me to renounce my views, retract them and, indeed, take to the streets to support the Palestinian resistance. According to them, hearing dissenting views on the subject within the association would have been detrimental to internal debate. I said no.” When contacted by this newspaper, Libero stated that it was not aware of any such incident.

The fact remains that it is precisely the issue of Gaza that stirs the passions of the Young Democrats most fervently. “It’s also a matter of political calculation.” Speaking to us this time is not a reformist, but a Schleinian. According to him, the spotlight is on the conflict in the Middle East to win more votes: “With Italy having a growing number of younger citizens with links to the Maghreb, the issue is deeply felt. That’s why more attention is being paid to that front and less to the situation in Ukraine.” Ludovico Manzoni has attempted to redress this imbalance in attention; as his first act as Foreign Affairs Officer for the Young Democrats, he chose to travel to Odessa on 24 February to mark the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion. “Being there is a political act of solidarity with the Ukrainian people, who have been ravaged by years of war. Listening to the voice of the people who are suffering is the first and most important guiding principle in resolving a conflict,” he wrote in a letter to Il Foglio.

Once the anniversary has passed, however, everything reverts to the classic Manichaean dichotomy: Palestinian resistance on one side, Zionist Nazis on the other. People even lash out at the PD itself just to assert their own views. A striking example is the draft bill on anti-Semitism put forward by Graziano Delrio, a PD senator and former Minister for Infrastructure, who is one of the best-known figures in the reformist movement. According to many centre-left figures, the definition of anti-Semitism contained in the bill would censor even the most trivial criticisms of Israel’s actions. Here too, the young are following the lead of the older generation (despite the fact that many of them had approved that very definition years earlier). And so, on the social media accounts of the Neapolitan Young Democrats, the proposal has been dubbed the “Delirio bill”, accused of being “a shameful authoritarian twist and a restriction on dissent. Unacceptable from anyone with a PD membership card in their pocket”. In the comments beneath the posts, some call for “these elements to be expelled from the party”. Meanwhile, in private chats, the tone is harsher towards the more reformist figures: “I hate Picierno. She’s a shitty liberal.” Not exactly flattering for the Democrat and Vice-President of the European Parliament, who has been under police protection for months following threats received via email, letters and posts from pro-Putin supporters and pro-Pal extremists.

“This approach is simply off-putting, elitist and sectarian. The risk is that the party will be perceived in the same way,” the young Roman Democrat and reformist tells us: “That way, we’ll simply lose out.” Both votes and membership cards. “Between Locri and the surrounding province, membership has fallen from 1,200 to just under 200: a rather serious decline for a party that has always made its strength its deep local roots,” continues the former Young Democrat from Chianese. “I left the PD partly because of the Young Democrats,” says Daniele Nahum, who served as president of the Union of Young Jews of Italy for three years and is now a Milan city councillor representing Azione. “Here, they’ve held conferences on apartheid in Palestine. They even invited a young Muslim woman who had praised the events of 7 October as an act of resistance.” Among the other guests were UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese and Moni Ovadia, an artist and activist who supports Palestinian rights: “They’ve now adopted a truly far-left stance, and the Young Democrats in Milan have the party firmly in their grip with a very strong support base. The risk, therefore, is that at the next city council meeting there will be a great many Young Democrats holding those very positions,” warns Nahum.

“I am proud to have left the Young Democrats. Among the Socialists, I have rediscovered the autonomy that was previously lacking. Reformism is now in decline even within the PD,” continues the young Socialist Zammillo: “I no longer recognise the Young Democrats where I grew up.” With the under-30s so aligned with the most extreme and radical fringes, what remains of the Young Democrats? “A pen. The youngest members are kept inside; they might be granted an appointment or a role that gives them a bit of visibility, but nothing more. These youth groups would serve a great social purpose because they allow young people to grow, but neither the PD nor the Young Democrats seem to have realised this,” concludes the former Young Democrat Chianese. Who, seeing how things have turned out since he left, is gradually losing all ties with the world of the left in which he grew up: “If I could go back, I’d never join the party; in fact, I’ve sent a request to be removed from the PD’s membership register. I now even find it hard to watch La7.” Talk about burning your bridges.