Why Pina Picierno abandoned the Socialists

For a politician so focused on the battles raging outside the European Union, this struggle had come too close to home.

Pina Picierno has spent years warning about Vladimir Putin, championing military aid to Ukraine and building networks with Russian dissidents.

Now the European Parliament vice-president has turned her fire on the Italian Democratic Party, which was until recently her political home.

This month she abandoned the social democratic PD and its S&D grouping in the European Parliament to join Renew Europe, cementing her reputation as one of the sharpest critics of what she sees as a rising populist tendency inside the European centre-left.

“The extremes today are the reformists,” she said only half-jokingly. “If we don’t stop this populist surge, we in the liberal democratic camp will be left with nothing but the pieces,” she added.

For Picierno, the break with the PD was years in the making. A founder of the party in 2007 and one of its most recognisable Italian politicians in Brussels, she describes leaving as a “mourning process” after nearly two decades of political activism.

“That party is the home I built,” she said over black coffee in her 15th-floor office in Brussels.

“I put up the posters, stayed up all night, set up campaign booths…I’ve dedicated my entire life to that party.”

The rupture, she said, came to a head over Ukraine.

While most European social democratic parties rallied firmly behind Kyiv after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Picierno believes PD leader Elly Schlein bucked that trend.

Schlein, Picierno argued, has gradually moved closer to the pacifist positions advocated by Giuseppe Conte, the former prime minister and Five Star Movement leader, for example, on military aid to Ukraine.

“She is the only Western political leader who has never been to Kyiv in the four years since the invasion,” Picierno said.

From Germany to France, and increasingly in Italy, debates over defence spending, ‘strategic autonomy’ and support for Ukraine have exposed tensions between traditional social democrats and a younger generation more sceptical of military power and Western alliances.

“Peace is not maintained simply by filling one’s mouth with this word,” Picierno said. “You defend yourself and defend peace by being prepared, not through pacifism, because cowardly disengagement does not allow us to defend the peace we wish to maintain.”

According to Picierno, the old bipolar contest between left and right has been replaced by what she calls “bi-populism”, a system in which populists on both sides increasingly converge on Europe, foreign policy and international security.

The Italian MEP is openly calling for a new reformist front bringing together liberals, moderates and pro-European forces beyond traditional party structures ahead of Italy’s next election. She added that there are voices in the national delegation on the same wavelength.

Living under protection

For the past year, Picierno has lived under police protection after receiving threats linked to her work against authoritarian regimes and her outspoken positions on Russia.

A politician who describes herself as instinctively sociable and physically present in political campaigning Picierno said she suddenly found herself unable to take a walk alone or attend demonstrations without security approval.

She said the experience profoundly altered her life. “I was afraid,” she admitted.

When Italian authorities informed her she faced a credible threat, she says she spent days crying, and what followed was not only fear but isolation that still surfaces when she talks about the experience.

“And above all, I felt very lonely,” she said. “This was something very difficult for me to understand because, aside from my personal friends, who were there and still are, I didn’t have the support of my community, nor even of my group.”

Within days of leaving the Socialists and Democrats group, the political group questioned whether she should remain one of the European Parliament’s vice presidents, a position she won with support extending well beyond her own political family.

The vice presidency, she argued, belongs to Parliament rather than to any national party delegation.

“I was elected by the plenary,” she said, noting that more than 400 MEPs backed her candidacy in a secret ballot. “The plenary cannot become the place where the internal divisions of the [Italian] Democratic Party are settled.”

While negotiations over the Parliament’s midterm leadership are already beginning behind closed doors, Picierno leaves little doubt where she stands. She describes Parliament President Roberta Metsola as “the best option available” and credits the Maltese conservative with giving the institution visibility and moral clarity during Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“She was the first Western leader to go to Kyiv,” Picierno said. “She has been unwavering in the defence of liberal democracy.”

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