Rome, September 11, 2026 – Emma Bonino has died at 78 years old: the leader of +Europa, multiple times minister of the Republic and historic face of the Italian radical movement, revealed in 2015 that she had a tumor in the left lung, which required a long treatment. In 2023 she declared she had defeated the disease, but later she was hospitalized several times for respiratory problems and metabolic difficulties, also receiving a visit from Pope Francis. Yesterday she was discharged from the intensive care unit of the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome and was transferred to a private clinic, before the fatal worsening that occurred in the last hours.
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The grief of Più Europa
“Emma has left us but will never leave us. Today we do not only lose our leader, we lose one of the clearest, bravest, and freest protagonists in the political history of our country and the free world,” is the statement from the Radicals. “Emma was ‘chosen by radical politics’ when a ban changed her young life. From that moment she decided she would fight so that it could never happen to anyone else again. Activist, parliamentarian, minister, European commissioner. Always radically free.
Her life was a long fight against everything that denies freedoms: against clandestine abortion, against world hunger, against partitocracy, against infibulation, against judicialism, against genocides, against every form of authoritarianism. But even more numerous were her battles for democracy, for the rule of law, for international justice, for the rights and duties of every person and every family, for women’s self-determination, for the freedom to choose, until the end. And for a united, democratic, and federal Europe: the United States of Europe. This is her legacy: it does not matter how many times you have to lose before you manage to win and conquer freedom for all. There are no words to describe the pain and emptiness we feel today. From tomorrow we will try to find the right words to transform the gratitude we feel for having been able to fight by her side into the courage to continue fighting as she taught us. Thank you Emma, from the bottom of our hearts.”
From the right to abortion to the liberalization of drugs
From the right to abortion to the liberalization of drugs, there is no civil rights battle in the last 50 years that has not counted Emma Bonino among its supporters, alongside the other great pillar of the Italian radicals Marco Pannella. Born in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, she was elected in 1976 at 28 years old to the Chamber among the ranks of the Radical Party; three years later she became a European parliamentarian and began fighting for rights in Eastern European countries, then engaging for the creation of an International Criminal Court, which became a reality only in 2002.
She took to the streets at the end of the 1980s to support Solidarność in Poland, against the dictatorship of Wojciech Jaruzelski, a gesture that cost her arrest and expulsion from the country; from that moment she was arrested outside Italy as well, in New York in 1990, when she distributed sterile syringes in opposition to the American law on medical prescriptions, and in Kabul, Afghanistan, for having photographed some women: when she was taken to jail by the Taliban the radical leader was the European Commissioner in office for consumer policy, fisheries, and humanitarian aid.
Throughout the 1990s she strongly supported international campaigns against war crimes in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and for the moratorium on the death penalty, established by the UN General Assembly in 2007. As European Commissioner she fought to raise awareness of the Srebrenica massacres and supported military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, making a tough choice that marked an important break with the pacifist movement. Promoter of several referendums in her career, starting with the one on abortion, Bonino has been a reference point for Italian and European feminism since the beginning: in 1975, before her first parliamentary term, she founded CISA (Information Center on Sterilization and Abortion) and later voluntarily surrendered to arrest to raise awareness on the issue of access to free and safe abortion in Italy. These battles accompanied her throughout her life: in 1998 she supported “A flower for the women of Kabul,” an international action to counter discrimination against women in Taliban-led Afghanistan; in 2003 she fought for the ratification of the Maputo Protocol on “Women’s Rights in Africa” to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights; she also promoted the international campaign “Stop FGM” for the abolition of female genital mutilation.
After an intense season of missions for the affirmation of rights worldwide, in the 2000s she was Minister of International Trade and European Policies in the second Prodi Government, which lasted from 2006 to 2008; she returned to a similar role from 2013 to 2014 as Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Letta Government. Elected seven times to the Chamber and twice to the Senate, the former minister has always been part of center-left coalitions, except when in the XII legislature (from 1994 to 1996) she sat among the center-right benches. After a life within the Radical Party and the Italian Radicals, Emma Bonino continued her political path with the European federalist and liberal formation +Europa, launched at the end of 2017 ahead of the 2018 elections, becoming a real party in 2019. The world of Italian and European politics gathers around the memory of one of its most influential figures, who for five decades represented in the streets and institutions an tireless voice for the conquest of civil rights.
