Emma Bonino, leader of abortion and divorce battles that changed Italy, dies at 78

ROME (AP) — Emma Bonino, who rose to political prominence as a leader of campaigns by the Radical Party that legalized abortion and divorce in the 1970s in heavily Roman Catholic Italy, against the objections of the Vatican, has died. She was 78.

Her party of recent years, +Europa, announced her death.

“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 party said.

Italy’s conservative Premier Giorgia Meloni paid tribute to Bonino, saying their different backgrounds and perspectives “never prevented me from acknowledging her significance and her role in our nation’s public life.”

“For decades, Emma Bonino has been a strong and recognizable voice in Italian politics, championing her ideas with determination,” Meloni wrote on social media.

Even after the Radicals’ political star faded, Bonino remained a key political figure and human rights campaigner active in Italy for over five decades. She served as a European commissioner for then-Premier Silvio Berlusconi and was a co-founder of the death penalty watchdog Hands Off Cain. But her bid in 1999 to become Italy’s first female president failed.

She remained known to younger generations as a sought-after political pundit, appearing frequently on Italian TV with her sharp wit and cutting insights. After her cancer diagnosis in 2015, she invariably appeared in public wearing colorful headscarves.

Bonino’s passing follows the recent death of several other feminist heroes, including activist Gloria Steinem and poet Robin Morgan.

Bonino challenged the Vatican and a conservative political establishment

Born on March 9, 1948, in Bra — not far from the northwestern Italian city of Turin, where carmaker Fiat’s factory drove the economy — she spent her childhood on a farm, where she was often tasked to pasture pigs, a lifestyle she described as “deadly boring” in a 2023 TV interview.

Bonino first got involved in Italian politics because she wanted to change the law. At 26, she became pregnant and had an abortion, even though it was illegal at that time.

Recalling the experience as one of the most humiliating of her life, in 1975 she was among the founders of the Information Center for Sterilization and Abortion, an organization that provided information and performed abortions before they were legalized.

The following year she was elected to the Italian parliament for the maverick Radical Party, a bastion of anticlericalism, civil libertarianism, feminism, liberalism and radicalism in Italy.

The party proposed itself as the strongest opposition to the Italian political establishment, seen as corrupt and conservative, and to the Catholic Church’s extensive influence on Italian society.

In 1978 abortion was legalized. That particular campaign may have been over, but Bonino had found her vocation: Politics was her life, and she became one of the most active leaders of the Radical Party and its successors.

She held key political roles in Italy and at the EU

A veteran legislator in Italian politics and an activist for various reform policies, she was elected six times as a Lower House lawmaker and two times as a senator. In 2017, she became the leader of +Europa, a liberal, European federalist party slate she launched ahead of the 2018 Italian general election.

An explosive presence in politics during her 50-year-long career, Bonino was one of the few Italian political figures who scored important achievements both at home and internationally.

Bonino won European exposure in a role she owed to then center-right Premier Berlusconi who, in 1995, offered her one of Italy’s two seats in the European Commission.

As a Commissioner she forged the EU’s consumer protection policy and created the European Commission Humanitarian Office, which is now the primary European humanitarian arm. It was this last portfolio, the humanitarian affairs, that she felt most strongly about.

She traveled to war zones — former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan — and convinced Europe that humanitarian assistance couldn’t be an excuse for lack of political or military intervention.

In June 1999 she headed a slate named after her — Lista Bonino — at the European elections. It was an overwhelming success: The party got 8.5% of the votes and became Italy’s fourth political force.

Bonino served as foreign minister, trade minister and EU affairs minister in Italian center-left governments of the 2000s and 2010s.

She was one of the strongest advocates for a common European foreign and defense policy. “My passion is humanity,” she said in May 2025, when her hometown Bra granted her honorary citizenship. “I’ve got roots, I’ve got a homeland, a family, but precisely all that allows me to be a citizen of the world.”

She got involved with Arab women’s battle for equality in 2001 and started spending half her time in Cairo. She became fluent in Arabic — she had graduated in foreign languages at Milan’s Bocconi University — and built a network of intellectuals, politicians and prominent civil society figures.

She shared a humanitarian mission with Pope Francis

Never married, she maintained strong bonds with her family in Piedmont. “My father died before I could show him I could accomplish something,” she recalled in a 2020 interview with Vanity Fair. “He never understood my restlessness. He used to tell me: Emma, you are like Japanese poetry: beautiful, but I can’t understand it.”

In January 2015, she announced on Radio Radicale that she was suffering from lung cancer and was being treated with chemotherapy but didn’t plan to stop her political activity. In May of the same year, she said her cancer was in complete remission and eight years later appeared on a popular TV interview program announcing she was healed.

Over the years, Bonino cultivated a deep friendship with the late Pope Francis, despite their conflicting views on key ethical issues, including abortion and euthanasia.

In November 2024, Francis paid a home visit to Bonino — who had been just released from the hospital after treatment for respiratory problems — bringing her a bouquet of roses and chocolates.

A photo posted by Bonino on social media showed them both sitting in wheelchairs on her sun-drenched terrace in Rome.

Bonino said that during their conversations Francis always encouraged her to bring forward her humanitarian battles, defending those most in need.

When asked what battles she still needed to fight, Bonino used to say: “Many, too many. Human rights, world hunger, free scientific research … Ten lives won’t be enough.”

Bonino is survived by her siblings, Domenica and Giovanni, and their children.

Giada Zampano, The Associated Press