ITALY'S RADICAL CRUSADER STIRS THE CAULDRON

PORTRAIT OF EMMA BONINO

by Chris Endean

(The European, 9-15 December 1994)

Selling shoes on New York's Fifth Avenue as a university student hardly appears the best qualification for running the European Commission's consumer affairs portfolio. But Emma Bonino, Italy's first female commissioner, may yet prove to be that rare exception in European politics: the right person in the right place at the right time.

"I've been trying for this job since the late 1980s," says this 46-year-old deputy speaker of the Italian Parliament, a former MEP and secretary-general of the Radical Party. "After a decade in international politics, I'm not being hypocritical when I tell you that I'm well-equipped for this job."

The facts speak for themselves. To start with, Bonino's new post also covers humanitarian aid, a cause for which she has been known to stage both hunger and thirst strikes. And when it comes to raising the status of the consumer affairs portfolio, traditionally the "bęte noire" of Brussels bureaucrats, Bonino is used to fighting and winning lost causes.

In the 1970s she spent three weeks in jail for her role in a nationwide antiabortion campaign; she has helped promote a referendum on divorce, and won approval for a United Nations conference on the development of an International Crime Court.

Bonino refuses to discuss her plans for the Brussels job until she takes up her post in January, but there can be little doubt that her campaigning instincts will make the new commissioner a thorn in the side of the directorate-generals who cross her path. Within days of her appointment, she horrified Brussels officials when she made a characteristic threat to publish the confidential minutes of toplevel Commission meetings.

"When I start a new job I like to try to find a thread to pull," she says. "I still have to decide which one to pull in Brussels." One of those threads is likely to be a continuation of her vigorous Italian campaign to wake the world up to the repercussions of the North-South divide. "Sadly, after the nth famine, the public starts to get a little bit tired and you end up with orphan crises," she says. "Who remembers anything about the Kurds or Afghans? It's not that they have gone away, but that the media's attention has switched off."

Bonino's promotion to the European elite, apparently at the behest of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, still caught Italians by surprise - not because she was thought professionally unworthy, but because her background is so firmly that of a radical outsider, more used to sniping at authority than entering into its fold.

Italy has grown used to seeing her arrested in Rome, Prague and Warsaw in the name of civil rights. She recently appeared on a television chat show with a hangman's noose around her neck as she presses for an international moratorium on the death penalty.

Bonino, a member of the Radical Party, is just the latest example of a whole generation of political troublemakers who emerged in the 1970s, but which has joined the political establishment of the 1990s. Marco Panella, once the nation's favourite loony-left politician, is now one of Berlusconi's closest confidants, and Aids campaigner Marco Taradash, long a bugbear of the health ministry, chairs a parliamentary committee on state TV.

Bonino upset left-wingers when she allied herself with Berlusconi's right-wing alliance at the last election. But she rejects accusations that she has mellowed with age, arguing that she is fighting the same battles, only from a stronger and more prominent platform.

"I've always thought that neither pressure groups nor institutions can bring about lasting reform on their own. You need both. It's true I've lost my taste for hunger strikes, but I still believe in the ideals which originally inspired the Radicals."

Officially, the maverick Radical Party, which gave the world the porno-star MP, La Cicciolina, no longer exists as a parliamentary entity. Instead the Radical label attached to its members, who remain free to work inside other parties, is more than political. What they have in common is a devotion to civil liberties, anti-sexism and a critical view of what Italians call "party-ocracy" or the politicisation of all social life.

The earnest young revolutionaries of the 1970s, to a great extent, have won their traditional battles. Ideas once considered dangerously extremist, like the right to conscientiously object, divorce and abort, are now everyday facts of Italian life. When Radical MPs were pointing out 15 years ago that corruption was rife in Italy, they were ignored. They were, of course, right all along.

"The party system, which we alone denounced for 20 years, has collapsed," says Bonino. "We have not changed. It's the system."

Friends say that Bonino's combativeness and reformist zeal come from her family background in Turin, where she and her brother and sister were brought up in a tough working-class district.

Graduate in modern languages from Milan's Bocconi university, Bonino admits that she took little interest in student politics. But in 1975, at the age of 27, she became pregnant and decided to abort, a criminal offence at the time punishable by up to five years' imprisonment.

"I was outraged," she recalls. "I had suffered and yet woke up the day after to discover I had committed a crime."

So she channelled her anger into volunteer work at a local family planning centre, arranging for hundreds of "illegal abortions' with her own doctor rather than see women put their health at risk with Italy's massive backstreet abortion industry.

Determined not merely to defy the law but also to defeat it, Bonino then started a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience. "First we told the police about our work at the clinics, but they took no action. Then on 15 June 1975, I invited the police to arrest me for violating the antiabortion law. They put me in jail for three weeks."

The arrest of Bonino and her fellow campaigners transformed the abortion campaign from an important civil rights question into a national debate on the role of women in Italian society.

The Radical Party received 800,000 signatures for an abortion referendum. Then in April 1976, Bonino helped organise a march of 50,000 women on Rome. Only the calling of a general election and the approval of a law decriminalising abortion stopped the referendum going ahead. But Bonino's reputation as a civil rights campaigner was secure, her sparkling blue eyes recognised by millions of Italians.

Elected to parliament with the Radicals, later examples of her outrage included the successful passage through parliament of a divorce law and a referendum outlawing nuclear power stations.

She even adopted and brought up two children. She describes her later separation from these children when they were reclaimed by their natural parents as one of the most heartrending moments of her life.

"I never seem to have time for anyone," she says. "Always rushing from one airport to the next. It's surprising that anyone can put up with me."

Chris ENDEAN