Emma Bonino, Italian Campaigner for Civil Rights, Dies at 78

Emma Bonino, a campaigner for civil rights who helped push Italy to the left on issues like abortion and assisted dying while climbing to the top ranks of Italy’s political establishment, died on Friday in Rome. She was 78.

Più Europa, the left-leaning party that Ms. Bonino founded in 2017, announced her death. It did not give a cause. On Monday, Ms. Bonino had checked into a Rome hospital for treatment of a respiratory issue, according to ANSA, Italy’s main news agency.

Through five decades in politics, Ms. Bonino served as a lawmaker in the Italian and European Parliaments, briefly led Italy’s foreign ministry and oversaw the European Union’s humanitarian aid program. Though she mainly represented small parties, she wielded an outsize influence on Italian discourse, forcing debates on issues like women’s rights and helping erode the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church.

“Our backgrounds and perspectives were very different,” Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, on Friday on social media. “But that never prevented me from recognizing her influence and the role she played in our nation’s public life.”

Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s nonpartisan president, said in a : “She left a mark on the life of the Republic through her tenacious and consistent work. A radical, a liberal, a feminist, and decidedly a Europeanist, she was a protagonist in the movements and reforms that shaped the course of our society.”

Ms. Bonino was born on March 9, 1948, according to her , to a farming family in Bra, a town in northern Italy. Farm life bored her, she told interviewers. She moved to Milan for a university degree in foreign languages — to her father’s consternation and with her mother’s covert support, she told The New York Times in 2018.

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