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Emma Bonino, one of the defining figures in modern Italian politics and a driving force behind the campaigns that legalized abortion and divorce in a country long shaped by the Catholic Church, has died at the age of 78. Her party, +Europa, announced her death on Thursday, closing the chapter on a career that spanned more than five decades and touched nearly every major fight over civil liberties in postwar Italy.
Bonino was born on March 9, 1948, in the small town of Bra, near Turin in northwestern Italy, where she grew up on a farm and was often sent out to pasture pigs, a childhood she later described in a 2023 television interview as deadly boring. That restlessness never left her. After studying foreign languages at Bocconi University in Milan, she became fluent in Arabic and began building the network of intellectuals, politicians and civil society figures that would define her political life for the next fifty years.
Her entry into activism was deeply personal. At 26, Bonino became pregnant and had an abortion at a time when the procedure was illegal in Italy, an experience she later called one of the most humiliating of her life. Rather than stay silent about it, she turned the experience into a cause. In 1975, she was among the founders of the Information Center for Sterilization and Abortion, an organization that provided information on reproductive health and performed abortions before the practice was legalized. That work placed her at the center of the Radical Party’s campaigns, which succeeded in legalizing divorce in 1970 and abortion in 1978, both landmark shifts in a country where the Vatican’s influence over social policy had long gone largely unchallenged.
Bonino’s political career eventually moved well beyond activism into the highest levels of Italian and European government. She served as foreign minister, trade minister and European affairs minister across a series of center-left Italian governments during the 2000s and 2010s, and she became one of the strongest voices in European politics pushing for a unified European foreign and defense policy. Her time in Brussels and Rome cemented her reputation as a pragmatic reformer willing to work across party lines, even as she remained an unwavering advocate for the causes that defined her early career.
She remained a fixture in Italian public life well into her seventies, known for a sharp wit and blunt political commentary that made her a sought-after voice on Italian television. After being diagnosed with lung cancer in January 2015, she continued her political work through chemotherapy and later announced her cancer was in remission, appearing publicly for years afterward in the colorful headscarves that became part of her public image. In May 2025, her hometown of Bra granted her honorary citizenship, where she said simply that her passion was humanity.
Tributes poured in from across the Italian political spectrum following news of her death. Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose politics differed sharply from Bonino’s on many issues, paid tribute to her significance and her role in the country’s public life, a rare moment of cross-party recognition for a figure who had spent her career challenging entrenched political and religious authority. In a statement, +Europa described her life as a long struggle against everything that denies freedom, citing her work against clandestine abortion, world hunger, female genital mutilation, punitive justice systems, genocide and authoritarianism in all its forms.
Bonino also maintained an unusual personal friendship with the late Pope Francis despite their sharp disagreements on core ethical issues, a relationship that reflected her broader instinct for building bridges even with those who stood firmly opposed to her positions. She never married, though she kept close ties to her family in the Piedmont region throughout her life, and spoke candidly in interviews about her father’s difficulty understanding her drive for political change, once recalling that he compared her to Japanese poetry, beautiful but impossible for him to grasp.
Her death comes shortly after the passing of other prominent feminist figures internationally, including activist Gloria Steinem and poet Robin Morgan, adding to a sense among observers that a generation of women who shaped reproductive rights and feminist movements across the twentieth century is now passing from public life. In Italy specifically, Bonino’s death marks the loss of one of the last major figures from the Radical Party era that reshaped the country’s civil rights landscape in the 1970s, a period whose legal legacy, particularly around abortion access, remains politically contested in Italy and across much of Europe today.
Bonino’s decades of advocacy left a lasting mark on Italian law and on the broader European debate over reproductive rights, an issue that continues to generate political division across the continent even as the legal battles she fought as a young activist were won decades ago. Readers following how political and social movements continue to shape policy and public debate can find related coverage on Business Tech, which tracks how legal and political shifts intersect with broader societal change. Additional detail on Bonino’s career and the tributes following her death has been reported by the Associated Press.
She is survived by her extended family in Piedmont and by the political movement she helped build, which continues under the banner of +Europa, the party she led into the 2018 Italian general election and remained associated with for the rest of her life.
