Emma Bonino dies at 78, former Italian minister and EU commissioner

Emma Bonino, leader of the +Europa party, has died in Rome at the age of 78 from respiratory complications. Her death marks the end of one of the best-known careers in Italian politics of the past fifty years, a career that also had a strong European dimension: a figure well known, and at times controversial, in the neighbouring country and beyond.

Born in Bra, in Piedmont, Bonino entered politics in the mid-1970s, when she joined the Radical Party led by Marco Pannella. During that decade she became one of the leading voices of the civil rights movement, campaigning to defend the divorce law in the 1974 referendum and later fighting for the right to abortion in Italy.

In 1975 she was arrested after reporting herself for her activities with the Centro informazione sterilizzazione e aborto. The episode helped fuel the public debate that led, in 1978, to the passage of Law 194, which legalised voluntary termination of pregnancy in Italy.

From activism to institutions

Unlike other historic leaders of the Radical movement, who focused mainly on political provocation and referendums, Bonino managed to combine activism with senior institutional roles. Between 1995 and 1999 she served as European Commissioner for humanitarian aid and consumer protection, handling complex crises such as the one in the former Yugoslavia.

In later years she held government posts in Italy: from 2006 to 2008 she led the ministry of international trade and European policy in Romano Prodi's second government. In 2013 she was appointed foreign minister in the government led by Enrico Letta, taking charge of the Farnesina.

Her death closes a chapter in recent Italian political history: that of a figure who devoted her entire career to defending the rule of law and to the cause of European integration, moving between street activism and government responsibility, from the 1970s until her final years in public life.