«There will be no one like her. With that energy, that tenacity, that brazen audacity, that willpower, that elegance… and, in the end, there are not enough adjectives to describe a woman who has broken all molds and landed a punch on hypocrisy. Yet two words are enough: Emma Bonino». Thus the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera bids farewell to the former minister and former European commissioner, died in Rome at the age of 78.
Emma Bonino, a veteran in the fight for the right to divorce and abortion, was a member of the Italian Radical Party and managed to win the respect of the entire political spectrum in her country. “Today we lose not only our leader, but also one of the most perceptive, brave and free figures in the political history of our country,” said the small Più Europa party, which she herself founded.
Bonino held the posts of European Commissioner and Italian Foreign Minister, but she was best known for militant feminist work with an unwavering dedication to political and humanitarian causes. The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, paid tribute, stating that, although our origins and perspectives differed, that never prevented me from recognizing her importance and her role in the public life of our nation.
The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, also paid tribute, saying that “the Europe for which she fought will miss her” and noting that her forward-looking vision and her European legacy marked a path ahead of its time. For her part, the Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani valued her deep Europeanism, her intelligence, and her tireless work in favor of the moratorium on the death penalty.
The tireless struggle of Emma Bonino
Born in 1948 on a farm in Bra, in the northwest of Italy, as a child she was tasked with tending the pigs, a life she described as “dreadfully boring” in a 2023 interview. Bonino earned a degree in Foreign Languages and Literature at Bocconi University in Milan before joining the Radical Party. It was the beginning of a passionate political career that would last her entire life and, as she herself recounted, began thanks to a gynecologist.
Emma Bonino, during a visit to Madrid in 2015.
After discovering that she was sterile, Bonino became pregnant at 27. She chose to have an abortion and, in that same 2023 interview, she stated: “In my life I have known many kinds of courage, but not the courage to be a mother.” It was then that Bonino met a prominent advocate for women’s rights, embraced civil disobedience, and began accompanying women to a clinic where abortions were carried out in Florence.
She joined the campaign to legalize it, going on hunger strikes and demanding her detention for interrupting her pregnancy. It was these protests that eventually led her into politics. In 1975 she founded the Center for Information, Sterilization and Abortion (CISA) before running for Parliament and being elected a deputy for the Radical Party in 1976.
Abortion was legalized in Italy in 1978, but Bonino had already been pushing hard on a range of other issues, from liberalizing soft drugs to abandoning nuclear energy. In the following years, she battled for heroin treatment programs and against the death penalty and world hunger.
The high price of wielding a political weapon
Elected several times to the European Parliament, she served as European Commissioner for Consumer Protection from 1994 to 1999 and was named senator in Rome in 2008. She later assumed the post of Minister of International Trade and European Policies of Italy between 2006 and 2008, and subsequently served as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 2013 and 2014.
Bonino returned to political campaigning in 2018, heading a new political movement, Più Europa, to defend the rights of migrants and the European Union. By then she had become one of Italy’s best-known women politicians and held a prominent place in opinion polls, with 43% approval, only surpassed by then-prime minister Paolo Gentiloni. But, despite her slogan “Love me less, vote for me more”, the party did not reach the 3% of total votes required to win a seat in Parliament.
Emma Bonino and Manuela Carmena, during a colloquy in Madrid.
In 2015, Bonino was diagnosed with a pulmonary microcell carcinoma, a particularly aggressive form of lung cancer. In 2024 she was hospitalized again for breathing problems. While recovering at home, she received a surprise visit from Pope Francis. The two shared a concern for migrants’ rights and held a deep mutual respect, despite their different cultural and religious backgrounds. In a February 2025 interview, she stated that her body was failing her and that she was paying a physical price for having used it “as a political weapon” for decades.
She was one of the leading advocates of a common European foreign and defense policy. “My passion is humanity”, she declared in May 2025, when her hometown Bra granted her honorary citizenship. “I have roots, I have a homeland, a family, but precisely all of that allows me to be a citizen of the world.”
