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Emma Bonino, 78, Dies; The Guardian Recalls a Life That Remade Italian Politics

The Radical leader spent four decades on prisons, abortion and Europe. The foreign press remembers a fighter the South often watched from a distance.

Pietro Lasorsa470 wordsEdition №117Wednesday, 16 September 2026 — Edition № 117

Emma Bonino, the Italian feminist activist and politician, has died aged 78, according to an obituary published by the Guardian. The paper describes a career that began in the Radical party and ran through Parliament, the European Commission and a long campaign for women's rights.

The Guardian opens its account in 1974, when Bonino became pregnant after a doctor had told her she was sterile. She sought an abortion in a country where the practice was then illegal, and the paper presents that experience as the origin of a political life organised around a single question of personal autonomy.

The Local Italy reports that Italy's political world turned out on Tuesday for her state funeral. She had served as a government minister and as an EU commissioner, and the two foreign accounts together frame her as a figure who worked through European institutions as much as through Italian ones.

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Emma Bonino, 78, Dies; The Guardian Recalls a Life That Remade Italian Politics — La Veduta