Emma Bonino has been admitted to hospital in Rome with respiratory failure. She is now in a stable condition and alert.

Emma Bonino has once again been rushed to Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Doctors – according to reports – have decided to keep her in hospital overnight so that they can monitor her vital signs. Her condition is described as ‘serious’, but she is alert and conscious. It is understood that she was attended to at her home in the centre of the capital this afternoon and taken by ambulance as a code red emergency following a worsening of her breathing difficulties.

“Investigations and an assessment of her vital signs are currently underway following a deterioration in her respiratory function. She remains alert and lucid,” reported her attending doctor, Claudio Santini, this evening; he is in constant contact with the doctors at Santo Spirito. She is reportedly responding well to the initial treatment prescribed by the doctors at the Roman hospital.

The long-standing Radical Party leader, who is now 78 years old , had previously been admitted to the same hospital, in intensive care, back in November 2025. She was subsequently transferred to the Stroke Unit at San Filippo Neri and discharged after about a week. Doctors had ruled out a recurrence of the lung cancer she had been diagnosed with in 2015, attributing her illness to a metabolic problem. In this case too, according to initial reports, it appears to be a worsening of her respiratory failure.

Emma Bonino’s medical history has, in fact, been marked by lung cancer – more specifically, a microcytoma – which in 2015 affected her left lung, forcing her to undergo many years of chemotherapy. A microcytoma is one of the most aggressive forms of lung cancer. After a full eight years of treatment, she herself announced that she had successfully completed her treatment without ever giving up her beloved political work.

Emma Bonino was a long-standing activist in the Radical Party from its very inception and, more recently, one of the founders of +Europa. Above all, however, she was one of the most important figures in liberal radicalism during the Republican era and in Italian feminism. Her life is inextricably linked to the struggle for human and civil rights. From the 1970s onwards, as an activist and later as a Radical Party leader, she challenged the status quo by fighting for the self-determination of individuals. Her commitment began with the major civil rights battles in Italia: she was at the forefront of the campaign for the introduction of divorce and, above all, for the legalisation of abortion, even going so far as to turn herself in for having performed clandestine abortions in order to spur the debate.