Emma Bonino, a campaigner for civil rights who helped push Italy to the left on issues like abortion and assisted dying while climbing to the top ranks of Italy’s political establishment, died on Friday in Rome. She was 78.
Più Europa, the left-leaning party that Ms. Bonino founded in 2017, announced her death. It did not give a cause. On Monday, Ms. Bonino had checked into a Rome hospital for treatment of a respiratory issue, according to ANSA, Italy’s main news agency.
Through five decades in politics, Ms. Bonino served as a lawmaker in the Italian and European Parliaments, briefly led Italy’s foreign ministry and oversaw the European Union’s humanitarian aid program. Though she mainly represented small parties, she wielded an outsize influence on Italian discourse, forcing debates on issues like women’s rights and helping erode the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
“Our backgrounds and perspectives were very different,” Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, wrote on Friday on social media. “But that never prevented me from recognizing her influence and the role she played in our nation’s public life.”
Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s nonpartisan president, said in a statement: “She left a mark on the life of the Republic through her tenacious and consistent work. A radical, a liberal, a feminist, and decidedly a Europeanist, she was a protagonist in the movements and reforms that shaped the course of our society.”
Ms. Bonino was born on March 9, 1948, according to her official government profile, to a farming family in Bra, a town in northern Italy. Farm life bored her, she told interviewers. She moved to Milan for a university degree in foreign languages — to her father’s consternation and with her mother’s covert support, she told The New York Times in 2018.
Her decision in 1974 to have an abortion — then illegal in Italy — led to her political awakening. She began accompanying women to their abortions, also an illegal act, and later turned herself in to the police for having done so.
In 1976, she was elected to the Italian Parliament with the Radical Party, a tiny libertarian, anticlerical, feminist movement. Known for her sharp wit and acts of civil disobedience, she turned up to Parliament in clogs.
Two years later, lawmakers voted to legalize abortion, against heavy opposition from the Vatican, though the Radicals said the law did not go far enough. In 1981, Ms. Bonino and her party helped block new efforts to reinstate the ban.
For the next 45 years, she lobbied doggedly in Italy and abroad for abortion access, gender equality, solar and wind energy, the legalization of soft drugs, euthanasia, humanitarian aid and the easing of immigration laws. She also campaigned against the death penalty, nuclear energy and female genital mutilation. “Our ambition is not to promise things that people like most,” she told supporters in 2018.
Fiercely stubborn — she smoked through her treatment for lung cancer — Ms. Bonino went on a hunger strike while lobbying for the abortion pill to be made available in Italy (it was) and was arrested in New York City during the AIDS epidemic in a bid to force the city to distribute clean needles to drug users.
Although she challenged Italy’s establishment, Ms. Bonino, a tiny woman who toward the end of her life always wore a colorful turban, clawed her way into it. She was elected eight times to Italy’s Parliament; served as its Senate’s vice president; and was the country’s minister for several portfolios, including foreign affairs, trade and European affairs.
An icon to Italy’s left, she derided labels. “I’m not on the left,” she said in a television interview in 2018, “I am a ra-dical li-be-ral,” pausing between most of the syllables. It was Silvio Berlusconi, then Italy’s right-wing prime minister, who elevated her to a senior role at the European Union. And despite her resistance to Catholic influence, Ms. Bonino also struck up an abiding friendship with Pope Francis.
She never married and had no children. Two siblings survive her.
Ms. Bonino’s career was considered remarkable in a country that struggled for decades to fold women into politics and leadership.
“Power is always negotiated by the usual group of men,” Ms. Bonino told The Times in 2006.
One accolade eluded her: the Italian presidency, a role for which she openly campaigned — and to which Italy’s Parliament repeatedly declined to elect her.
Though she personally scored highly in public opinion polls, her political alliances struggled to win many seats, leading her to adopt a new slogan: “Love Me Less, Vote Me More.”
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