Emma Bonino, historical figure of Italian and European radicalism, has died

After Marco Pannella in May 2016 Emma Bonino also leaves us, and with her leaves the second champion of what has been the radical party in Italy, at least since the seventies of the last century. After the cancer diagnosed in 2015, the treatments, chemotherapy and then hospitalization in intensive care for respiratory problems in October 2024, which she also overcame, this time she didn't make it. The president of +Europa died today after a few days of hospitalization.

Summing up Emma Bonino's public life is not simple because, as for Pannella, her conception of politics has always been all-encompassing, body and soul in a literal sense, through an activism and militancy that have made Bonino one of the protagonists of liberal radicalism and feminism at a European level.

Born in Piedmont in Brà (Cuneo), born in 1948, Bonino joined the Radical Party in 1975, immediately playing a leading role in the campaigns for the liberalization of abortion and against nuclear power, carried out through the referendum and civil disobedience. In the following years he promoted numerous initiatives for the liberalization of soft drugs and the controlled distribution of heroin (his clash on drug control and crime prevention with the then UN undersecretary general, Pino Arlacchi, became famous at the end of the 1990s) while, on an international level, he committed himself to the defense of civil and political rights, for the abolition of the death penalty and against world hunger.

Deputy from 1976 to 1994, Bonino was president of the Transnational Radical Party from 1991 to 1993, and from 1993 to 1994 he held the position of secretary. From 1995 to 1999 he was an authoritative member of the European Commission as head of fisheries policy, consumer policy and the European office for humanitarian aid, dealing, during his role, with the major humanitarian crises of the 1990s, including that in the African Great Lakes Region and in the Balkans.

Elected to the European Parliament in 1979 and 1984, Bonino was reconfirmed in the European elections of June 1999, in which she presented herself, surprising everyone, with her own list called "Lista Bonino" which obtained as much as 8.5% of the votes at national level. In 2006, following the victory of the centre-left in the political elections, she was appointed Minister for International Trade and European Policies in the Prodi government.