Emma Bonino has died aged 78.
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The founder of More Europe, a longtime leading figure in Italy’s Radical Party and former government minister, passed away after her health deteriorated in recent weeks.
Bonino had recently been admitted to the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome after a respiratory crisis. She arrived in critical condition and was transferred to intensive care so that her condition could be monitored. After an initial improvement, on 10 September, she left the ward and was moved to a private facility.
In 2015, Bonino revealed she had a tumour in her left lung. She underwent treatment for years while remaining active in politics. In 2023, she announced that she had overcome the disease.
In the following years, however, new health problems emerged. In autumn 2024, she was admitted to hospital in Rome for respiratory issues and, in November 2025, she suffered another serious episode that required admission to intensive care. On that occasion, doctors ruled out a recurrence of the cancer, instead identifying a metabolic problem.
A life devoted to Radical Party causes
For more than half a century, Bonino was one of the most recognisable figures in Italian radical politics. From abortion to contraception, from the liberalisation of drugs to the fight against the death penalty, she became closely associated with many of the country’s major civil rights campaigns.
Born in Bra, in the province of Cuneo in 1948, she joined the Radical Party as a young woman and in 1976 was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Even before entering Parliament, in 1975 she had founded the Information Centre on Sterilisation and Abortion (CISA), working to make safe and accessible abortion available in Italy.
Her activism also involved putting herself directly on the line. She deliberately risked arrest to draw attention to the dangerous conditions faced by women who sought illegal abortions. Such campaigns helped make Bonino a leading figure in Italy’s feminist and radical movements.
From Italy to Europe
She entered the European Parliament in 1979. From Brussels, she focused in particular on human rights in Eastern Europe and opposition to authoritarian regimes.
In the late 1980s, she supported the Solidarność movement in Poland and was arrested and expelled from the country. In the years that followed, she was also arrested in New York during a campaign for the distribution of sterile syringes, and in Afghanistan, where she was detained by the Taliban after photographing women.
At the same time, her work broadened to major international issues: war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the fight against the death penalty and the construction of an international criminal justice system. She was also among the supporters of the creation of an International Criminal Court.
From 1994 to 1999, Bonino served as a European Commissioner, with responsibility for humanitarian aid, fisheries and consumer policy. During those years, she followed the crisis in the Balkans closely and spoke out about the responsibilities for, and consequences of, the violence in Bosnia.
Her support for Western military intervention in the Balkans was one of the most controversial choices of her career and brought her into conflict with part of the peace movement.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she continued to work on women’s rights, supporting campaigns against female genital mutilation and for the protection of women in Afghanistan while also working for the recognition of the rights of African women.
Minister and key player in Italian politics
Bonino returned to Italy’s government in 2006 as minister for International Trade and European Affairs in Romano Prodi’s second government. In 2013, she was foreign minister in the government led by Enrico Letta.
Over the course of her career, she was elected seven times to the Chamber of Deputies and twice to the Senate. Her parliamentary experience spanned different political camps, although her political path remained above all linked to the radical, liberal and pro-European area.
In 2017, she was among the driving forces behind the creation of More Europe, a liberal and pro-European political movement that became a party in 2019. Even in her later years, she remained an active voice in public debate on civil rights, Europe, and international affairs.
A radical voice spanning five decades
With her death, Italy loses one of the most influential political figures during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the 21st.
Alongside Marco Pannella, with whom she shared decades of Radical Party campaigns, Bonino brought issues into the streets and political institutions that, when she first championed them, were often still on the fringes of public debate.
Over time, she became an enduring part of Italian political history: combative, divisive for some, but hard to ignore.
From the battles over abortion to the death penalty, from Afghanistan to the Balkans, through to her pro-European commitment, Bonino built a political career around a conviction that never changed: rights are only truly rights if they can be defended even when doing so is uncomfortable.
