What links Rishi Sunak to Elly Schlein, the leader of the Italian left, and Raphaël Glucksmann, the great hope of the French Socialist party? America. The British Prime Minister lived in the US for a number of years, first as a student at Stanford University before working for a hedge fund in California. Schlein, born and educated in Switzerland, is the daughter of an American academic who cut her political teeth as a staffer on both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
The 44-year-old Glucksmann, born in the posh part of Paris to a prominent philosopher, has never lived in the States but he’s been a frequent visitor over the years. He touched on this in an interview in 2018: ‘When I go to New York or Berlin, I feel more at home, culturally speaking, than when I go to Picardy, and that’s the problem.’
Across Europe the left are in retreat politically
It’s been a problem, too, for Sunak and Schlein.
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