Farewell to Emma Bonino, the ‘Montecitorio minx’ who always stood up for rights
She chronicled the history of the Radicals in Italia. She passed away whilst fighting, just as she had lived her life. She leaves behind a unique legacy
Key points
She was very young amongst the women who had abortions, at a time when termination of pregnancy was not yet legal. She stood by Enzo Tortora, when few people understood just how tragically unjust his imprisonment was. She was the very different twin of Marco Pannella – he burly and verbose, she petite and concise – in a partnership of hunger strikes and referendum campaigns that wrote the noble and precious history of the Radicals and which seemed indestructible before cooling in the labyrinth of what ‘Mr Hood’, in his beloved and ostentatious recklessness, experienced as a betrayal and she as a duty: the embrace of the institutions.
Half a century of politics
First elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1976 with the Radicals, then re-elected with the Olive Tree coalition and Forza Italia, twice a Member of the European Parliament, a minister under Prodi and Letta, a European Commissioner under Berlusconi, and Vice-President of the Senate under Napolitano, Emma Bonino has spanned half a century in politics. She has always stood up for the oppressed in Italia and around the world, fighting at home for due process, decent prison conditions and civil rights – from abortion to divorce – and abroad against the death penalty and crimes against humanity in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East and Kurdistan. As Foreign Secretary, she was always capable of tackling crises with determination and courage. There were many such crises: in Libya, in Syria, and in India during the case of the two marines. She has always fought battles for civilisation, such as the campaign to end female genital mutilation. She has always been a staunch European at heart, convinced that Europe had come to a standstill at Maastricht rather than continuing with the necessary integration.
He was ‘biased: on the side of rights’
Like Pannella, she was a thorn in the side – as only truly free people can be – and for this reason defied easy categorisation: criticised by the right for her anti-prohibitionist stance on soft drugs and her campaigning for voting rights for immigrants and citizenship, and by the left for her economic liberalism and support for Israel. After all, she always claimed to be ‘biased: on the side of rights’. And on the side of international law. She was convinced that ‘change is possible, and so we must try; otherwise, there is no point in complaining’.
The first ‘Quirinabile’
She passed away after her final battle – the one against ‘the unwelcome guest – which had taken up residence in my left lung’, as she recounted in 2015, and which had returned two years ago. Her battle with cancer had not deterred her from any of her habits, including smoking. Least of all from active politics: wearing her magnificent, colourful turbans, she continued to collect signatures and stand for election to Parliament. Her last bid was in 2022, as part of the +Europa party, but she didn’t make it: the list failed to reach the 3 per cent threshold at national level. ‘Vote for me more and love me less,’ she quipped. Bonino has never, however, disappeared from the list of ‘potential Quirinale candidates’ since her unforgettable and provocative self-nomination in 1999, when her face featured prominently on posters with the caption ‘Finally, the right man’.
A woman who moved Italia and the world
Her radical spirit remained intact and untamed right up to her last breath. ‘Call Emma’ – that was the advice every women’s rights activist felt she was given whenever she was looking for tips on how to mobilise a public that was becoming increasingly distracted and apathetic. But within the ‘aunt of Italia’ – as she had recently described herself – all her other selves continued to dwell: the headstrong little girl from Bra, born in a farmhouse in the Cuneo area to a farming family; the ‘rascal of Montecitorio’, as Sandro Pertini called her; ‘half Joan of Arc and half Vispa Teresa’, as Giulio Andreotti noted in 1981 during the era of filibustering practised as a tactic alongside the historic Radical Party leadership group, which included, amongst others, Adele Faccio, Roberto Cicciomessere and Massimo Teodori. In 2011, the US magazine Newsweek included her – the only Italian – in its list of the ‘150 women who move the world’. Having moved and changed the world for the better is the ‘forever’ she leaves us with – she who chose not to have children because of the declared unbearability of that ‘commitment to forever’.
