Italian rights activist and European heavyweight Emma Bonino dies at 78

Indefatigable Italian rights activist and European heavyweight Emma Bonino died aged 78, her party Più Europa announced on Friday.

A former European commissioner and member of the European Parliament, Bonino held a series of senior positions at home, serving as lawmaker, senator and three-time minister, in a career that straddled Brussels and Rome.

For the EU, she was chief among the voices who helped establish the bloc as a defender of international human rights and became a passionate advocate for European federalism. For Italy, she was a radical liberal who refused to neatly fit into her country’s entrenched left-right divide, garnering respect across ideological lines without abandoning her activist roots.

“To me, power can be good or bad according to what you do with it,” Bonino said. “Power is having the responsibility to change things to the best of your abilities.”

Born in rural Piedmont, Bonino decided to dedicate her life to political activism after having an illegal abortion in 1974 — an experience that inspired her to join the feminist movement and launch civil-disobedience demonstrations.

Two years later, the then-28-year-old was elected to parliament as part of the libertarian-left Radical Party. Young, female and radical, she refused to adapt to her surroundings, using the hemicycle as a platform for campaigns to legalize abortion and divorce, ban nuclear power and secularize Italy.

After securing a seat in the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, the new MEP quickly realized the institution, then-based in Luxembourg, was stuck in a political backwater. Instead, Bonino said, she opted to ditch the Grand Duchy and move to Brussels, Europe’s true “decision-making center.”

Bonino quickly learned to leverage the bloc’s power dynamics, using her MEP status to take her human rights work global, and was repeatedly arrested while campaigning beyond the bloc’s borders.

Poland’s Communist regime briefly imprisoned her for participating in a pro-democracy demonstration in Warsaw in 1987, and she was detained in New York two years later for distributing sterile syringes to drug users in protest of America’s AIDS-prevention policies.

The complexity of politics in Rome propelled Bonino to global prominence.

Following Italy’s 1994 elections, the late center-right politician Silvio Berlusconi needed the Radical Party’s support to become prime minister. In exchange for the group’s backing, he agreed to nominate her as Italy’s European commissioner.

Bonino said she was initially “unhappy” with the appointment to what she considered “too much of a bureaucratic role.” She also regarded her portfolio — humanitarian aid, consumer policy and fisheries — as “crumbs.” But she soon warmed to the job, finding “the ideas that I supported on the street and as a militant can be better pursued on a transnational level.”

Bonino threw herself into aid work, traveling to conflict zones including the Balkans, Rwanda and Zaire to show the EU was actively confronting crises beyond its borders. Italian journalist Marco Zatterin, who served as her spokesperson in 1995, told POLITICO her hands-on approach and willingness to speak with “literally anyone” raised eyebrows in Brussels.

“She was nothing like the commissioners that had come before her,” he said. “The EU is disliked by most people because it often projects its status through bureaucratic norms that are removed from the world everyone else lives in, and she was the opposite of that.”

“Politicians tend to think of themselves as gods,” Zatterin noted, “but she was a listener.”

When Bonino spoke, however, she was direct and often unabashedly critical, taking aim at governments she believed were failing to respond to crises and capitals that continued doing business with dictatorships.

But her “straight talk” made her enemies across the bloc too, Zatterin said. It also became an issue when the EU found itself embroiled in the 1995 “Turbot War” with Canada, which saw Bonino accusing Ottawa of “piracy” after it seized a Spanish fishing trawler in international waters. It later came to light the European fleets Bonino was defending were overfishing and misreporting catches.

The commissioner’s critics also cheered when a 1998 fraud probe was launched into €2.4 million of fictitious humanitarian aid contracts awarded by the EU. Although investigators found no evidence of her involvement, Bonino’s time as commissioner still ended abruptly the following March, when Jacques Santer’s entire College resigned amid broader allegations of fraud and mismanagement surrounding France’s Édith Cresson.

But Bonino was swiftly able to resume her work, reelected to the Parliament just three months later.

In her later years, Bonino expressed frustration with an EU that, she said, “such as it is, doesn’t work.”

She also called for progress toward a “political union” that would allow Europe to “become a big dog like China and the USA” — though she firmly rejected the idea of a “European super-state,” pressing for an EU with strength in limited competences.

Bonino eventually returned to Italian politics in 2006, serving as minister European affairs in Romano Prodi’s center-left government, before becoming senate vice president. Her willingness to work across the aisle made her an outlier in Rome, and paved the way for her appointment as foreign minister under then-Prime Minsiter Enrico Letta in 2013. It is also what had her under repeat consideration for the presidency.

The respect Bonino garnered throughout her career also forged unusual personal relationships, like her friendship Pope Francis. Despite being ideologically opposed on issues like abortion, the two bonded over their shared support for migrants, with the pontiff hailing the fiercely anticlerical politician as an “example of freedom and resistance.”

Zatterin noted Bonino was always willing to work with governments of all ideological backgrounds, as she believed being in power gave her a better chance of advancing the causes she believed in.

“She was never an opportunist,” he said. “Her priorities were her causes.”