“Change is not a gala lunch,” she said in her live video post.
“Make yourselves comfortable, we have a long job to do. We won’t stop.
“We have to rebuild a perspective giving hope to the country. Let’s do it by sticking to our task.”
The PD leader, elected as the centre-left party’s first woman leader at the end of February, added that it was “unacceptable” to use the cash from the European recovery fund to buy weapons.
Instead, she said that a commissioner that knows the lay of the local land was needed to oversee reconstruction after the Emilia-Romagna floods and landslides that killed 15 people and caused billions of euros of damage to property, infrastructure and crops.
Schlein, 38, has faced heavy criticism from moderate and reformist elements of her party, especially post-Christian Democrat ones, after the centre left won just one of seven provincial capitals in Sunday’s mayoral run-offs.
The only successful PD candidate was in Vicenza, and told party leaders not to attend rallies.
PD lost Ancona for the first time in 30 years.
ANSA
