While Italian politics struggles to find convergence on a name that can bring a woman to the Quirinale, in Europe it plays a completely different music.
In fact, with the election of Maltese Roberta Metsola,
the first exponent of the Erasmus generation to occupy the most important position in the European Parliament
, the presence of women at the top of the Union is further strengthened.
The new president of the Eurochamber joins the presidents of the EU Commission, the German Ursula von der Leyen, and the ECB, the French Christine Lagarde, bringing the main top positions held by women to three out of four (the Belgian Charles Michel remains for now president of the European Council).
The 43-year-old Maltese is also the youngest among those - including the French Simone Veil in 1979 and Nicole Fontaine in 1999 - who have come to lead the house of European democracy. Among the 27 leaders of the EU countries at the moment, however, there are only four women and all from the North, since after Angela Merkel left the scene to sit around the table of the European Council, the premieres of Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Sweden remained . And things are not going much better in the national parliaments, where according to the latest data, the female share is still at 32%. For this reason, the fact that in the new Dutch executive half of the ministers - 10 out of 20 - are women has made headlines.
Born in a popular area of Malta and grandson of a Royal Navy cook, Metsola, a lawyer with a passion for politics, discovered the EU thanks to the Erasmus program and studies at the College of Europe in Bruges. Militant of the Maltese Christian Democrat students, he showed off in 2003 thanks to the pro-community campaign for the referendum that in 2003 brought Malta to the Union. Married to a Finn and mother of four, in 2009 the first attempt to enter the European Parliament failed.
She was then elected with the 2013 alternatives, becoming in 2017 vice-president of the Petitions Commission as well as a member of the commission of inquiry on money laundering which investigated the revelations of the Panama Papers, a scandal to which the dramatic murder of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was also linked. In November 2020, thanks to her work in the various commissions and her battle against corruption that led her on a collision course with the premier of her country, Joseph Muscat (so much so that, in a public meeting in 2019, she refused to hold him the hand), was chosen by the EPP to fill the role of first vice president of Parliament, during the presidency of David Sassoli. Now, with an overwhelming majority (458 votes out of 617), Metsola has come to lead theStrasbourg Assembly demonstrating to all of Europe that to elect a woman it is enough to want to.
