Emma Bonino, the Italian radical politician who spent five decades championing abortion rights, European integration, and liberal causes across the continent, has died at 78, drawing tributes even from conservative rivals who opposed nearly everything she stood for.
Bonino's party, +Europa, announced her death on September 11, 2026. The cause was not officially stated, though Bonino had battled aggressive lung cancer since a January 2015 diagnosis and was hospitalized for respiratory problems as recently as November 2024.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a conservative who sits on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Bonino on nearly every major issue, paid tribute on social media. Meloni wrote:
"For decades, Emma Bonino has been a strong and recognizable voice in Italian politics, championing her ideas with determination."
Meloni added that their different backgrounds and perspectives "never prevented me from acknowledging her significance and her role in our nation's public life." The tribute was notable precisely because Meloni's governing coalition represents the kind of traditional, Catholic-influenced conservatism that Bonino spent her career opposing.
Born March 9, 1948, in Bra, a small town near Turin in northwestern Italy, Bonino grew up on a farm and later described her childhood lifestyle as "deadly boring" in a 2023 television interview. She graduated in foreign languages from Milan's Bocconi University and entered politics through the Radical Party, a group that positioned itself as the fiercest opposition to Italy's political establishment and the Catholic Church's influence over public policy.
At 26, Bonino became pregnant and had an abortion when the procedure was still illegal in Italy. The experience shaped the rest of her political life. In 1975, she co-founded the Information Center for Sterilization and Abortion, an organization that provided information and performed abortions before legalization. Italy legalized abortion in 1978, following campaigns by the Radical Party. Divorce was also legalized during the 1970s after similar efforts.
Bonino won election to the Italian parliament in 1976 representing the Radical Party. Over the following decades, she was elected six times as a Lower House lawmaker and twice as a senator, a record of electoral durability that few Italian politicians of any stripe can match.
For American conservatives, Bonino's career offers a useful case study in how the European left operates. Where the American progressive movement often works through courts and executive orders, Bonino and the Radical Party pursued their agenda through referendums and direct political campaigns, a contrast to the approach of some American Democrats who prefer to bypass legislative debate entirely when pushing social policy.
In 1995, center-right Premier Silvio Berlusconi offered Bonino one of Italy's two seats in the European Commission, a move that surprised observers given their political differences. As Commissioner, Bonino forged the EU's consumer protection policy and created the European Commission Humanitarian Office, now described as the primary European humanitarian arm.
Her time in Brussels also took her to war zones. She traveled to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, and Afghanistan during her tenure. In June 1999, she headed a slate called Lista Bonino at European elections, and the party captured 8.5 percent of the vote, enough to become Italy's fourth-largest political force at the time.
That same year, Bonino mounted a bid to become Italy's first female president. The effort failed. She went on to serve as foreign minister, trade minister, and EU affairs minister in center-left Italian governments during the 2000s and 2010s.
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola offered her own tribute. Breitbart reported Metsola said, "The Europe she fought for will miss her." Bonino was one of the strongest advocates for a common European foreign and defense policy, a position that put her squarely in the federalist camp that many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic view with deep skepticism.
Bonino's party did not hold back in its tribute. +Europa's statement cast her career in sweeping terms:
"Her life was a long struggle against everything that denies freedom: against clandestine abortion, world hunger, the stranglehold of party politics, female genital mutilation, punitive justice, genocide, and every form of authoritarianism."
The Associated Press reported that the party also called her "one of the most clear-sighted, courageous and free figures in the political history of our country." Whether one agrees with that assessment depends entirely on where one sits politically. Bonino's admirers saw a fearless crusader; her opponents saw someone who worked relentlessly to strip traditional institutions of their influence over Italian life.
In 2001, Bonino took up the cause of Arab women's equality and began spending half her time in Cairo. She became fluent in Arabic. She also co-founded Hands Off Cain, a watchdog organization focused on opposing the death penalty worldwide.
When asked what battles she still needed to fight, Bonino once answered: "Many, too many. Human rights, world hunger, free scientific research... Ten lives won't be enough." It was the kind of answer that made her a hero to European liberals, and that underscored how far her worldview sat from the priorities of ordinary Italians worried about immigration, economic stagnation, and the erosion of national sovereignty.
In January 2015, Bonino announced on Radio Radicale that she was suffering from lung cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. She said she did not plan to stop her political activity. By May 2015, she reported her cancer was in complete remission. Around 2023, she appeared on a popular Italian television interview program and announced she was healed.
After her diagnosis, Bonino invariably appeared in public wearing colorful headscarves, a visual signature that became inseparable from her public identity in her final years. She became leader of +Europa in 2017 and launched the party ahead of the 2018 Italian general election.
One of the more striking details of Bonino's later life was her deep friendship with the late Pope Francis. The two cultivated a relationship over the years despite holding conflicting views on abortion and euthanasia, issues that sit at the very center of Catholic moral teaching. In November 2024, Pope Francis paid a home visit to Bonino after she was released from the hospital following treatment for respiratory problems. He brought her roses and chocolates.
Bonino posted a photo on social media showing herself and the Pope sitting in wheelchairs on her sun-drenched terrace in Rome. She said Francis always encouraged her to bring forward her humanitarian work and defend those most in need. Whatever one makes of the theological implications, the friendship spoke to a personal warmth that even Bonino's political opponents acknowledged. The contradictions in American politics, where progressive leaders often prefer confrontation to dialogue, make such cross-ideological friendships rarer by the year.
In May 2025, Bonino's hometown of Bra granted her honorary citizenship. She accepted with characteristic directness:
"My passion is humanity. I've got roots, I've got a homeland, a family, but precisely all that allows me to be a citizen of the world."
In a 2020 interview with Vanity Fair, Bonino recalled her father, who died before she rose to prominence. "He never understood my restlessness," she said. "He used to tell me: Emma, you are like Japanese poetry: beautiful, but I can't understand it."
Bonino never married. She is survived by her siblings, Domenica and Giovanni, and their children. She maintained strong bonds with her family in the Piedmont region throughout her life, even as her political career took her across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Bonino's death follows the recent passing of activist Gloria Steinem and poet Robin Morgan. For the European and American left, the losses represent the departure of a generation of women who built the institutional architecture of modern feminism, a movement whose current heirs often struggle with contradictions their predecessors never had to confront.
Italy itself has changed. Meloni's conservative government holds power. The European federalism Bonino championed faces resistance from voters across the continent who want less Brussels, not more. The Catholic Church's formal influence may have waned, but the cultural conservatism Bonino spent her career fighting has found new political expression in parties that win elections.
Bonino fought her battles in the open, through elections and referendums, and she won many of them. That her fiercest political opponents still honored her at her death says something about the woman. It also says something about the distance between Italian political culture and the scorched-earth partisanship that defines so much of public life elsewhere.
You can disagree with everything Emma Bonino stood for and still recognize that she stood for it honestly, which is more than most politicians on either side of the Atlantic can claim.