The Argument Italy Is Still Having, and the Woman Who Won It

The death of Emma Bonino, at seventy-eight, has been reported abroad as the passing of a militant: the Guardian calls her the radical who stood up to the Vatican, the New York Times the campaigner who helped erode the political sway of the Catholic Church, France 24 the champion of the battles to legalise divorce and abortion. Each of those descriptions is accurate, and each of them is written in the past tense. That is the interesting part. The foreign wires treat the questions Bonino pressed — divorce, abortion, the place of the Church in public life — as settled history, a chapter closed in the 1970s by a country that then moved on. Readers of the international press could be forgiven for thinking Italy finished that argument and filed it away.

From outside, this is how Italy is habitually narrated: as a nation of operatic gestures, of family and faith, whose modernising struggles were won once and for all by a handful of brave radicals. The obituaries are generous, and they are not wrong. But they flatten a country that is still, in 2026, negotiating the same terrain — over the legal status of surrogacy, over access to abortion in hospitals where conscientious objection is widespread, over the Church's voice in debates on the end of life. The Guardian's phrase, that Bonino stood up to the Vatican, implies a single confrontation. In practice it has been a long argument with many rounds, and it did not end with her.

We note this not to diminish her. Bonino's career — from the Radical Party's campaigns to the foreign ministry, to the European Parliament, to a lung-cancer diagnosis in 2015 that she discussed publicly and without self-pity — is the record of someone who understood that in Italy a political question is rarely answered once. It is answered again every few years, in a different Parliament, before a different generation. The foreign press, which prefers its Italy either picturesque or in crisis, has little vocabulary for that kind of patient, repetitive work. It is less dramatic than a confrontation with the Vatican, and considerably more like governing.

So we read the tributes with gratitude and a certain distance. They describe the Italy the world can see: a country whose church-state settlement looks complete from a desk in London or New York. They cannot quite describe the Italy in which that settlement is re-litigated in every budget, every hospital, every election. Bonino spent five decades in that second country. The obituaries are right that she changed it. They are wrong only in implying the change is finished.