Emma Bonino, Italy’s activist commissioner, dies at 78

Relevance to the sub: One of the most famous and popular figures in Italian radicalism, feminism and liberalism has died today, leading to near-unanimous tributes across the political spectrum

Emma Bonino, one of the most prominent political figures of postwar Italy, has died today after a lifetime of activism on all fronts, from abortion rights, to divorce, to European construction and migrants' rights, has announced her party Più Europa (More Europe).

Born in a farm in 1948, she studied foreign languages and literature in Milan before starting a political career at the Radical Party, a center-left liberal movement. In 1974, she made the hard decision to get an abortion, at the time an illegal and highly dangerous procedure in Italy – scarred by her experience, she dedicated most of her early activism to push for the legalization and liberalization of abortion access for Italian women, with a first victory in May 1978 when the Italian government allowed women to terminate a pregnancy during the first 90 days – or twelve weeks and six days.

From her seat in the Italian Parliament, where she pushed for abortion and divorce rights, a moratorium on nuclear power and secularization of Italy, she jumped to European politics by winning a seat in the European Parliament in its first direct election in 1979. In Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Brussels, she fought relentlessly to further human rights and European construction, first as an MEP, then a European commissionner, where she leveraged her position to launch information and activist campaigns to protect and advocate for causes as varied as freedom of speech in Poland, protecting drug addicts in Europe and the US, against female genital mutilation in Africa, and women's rights in Afghanistan.

A staunch supporter of NATO and European solidarity, she supported military intervention to stop Serbian advance in Kosovo and founded an initiative called "United States of Europe" aiming to federalize the European Union, and had often voiced her frustration with the failures of the EU to live up to its ideals.

In her later years, she had developed a close relationship with the late Pope Francis – despite their strong differences over abortion and divorce rights, they had bonded over the need to protect migrants from the surging xenophobia and anti-immigration movement in Europe. In 2016, Pope Francis had compared her to Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman as a "forgotten giant" of European construction.

She died in Rome following a long battle with cancer, and was met with near-unanimous tributes from Italian politicians across the political spectrum. "Emma Bonino has been for decades an important and recognized voice of Italian politics, defending her ideas with determination. Our paths and sensitivities were very different, but it never prevented me from recognizing her influence and her role in the public life of our nation", reacted the far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni.