Politics & Power Quote by Emma Bonino

A politician doesn’t reach for a phrase like “liberal prospect” unless she’s doing two things at once: staking out ideology and preemptively narrowing the terms of debate. Emma Bonino’s line is built like a manifesto in miniature. “I mean to” is volitional, almost stubbornly personal; it frames liberalism less as a party label than as a chosen posture, one that asks to be judged by intent and consistency rather than by factional loyalty. The verb “defend” is doing heavy lifting, too. It implies threat, not celebration: rights aren’t airy principles here, they’re contested terrain that requires guarding against majoritarian pressure, bureaucratic creep, and moral crusades.

The subtext is classic Bonino: individual rights as the irreducible unit of politics, even when that stance is unpopular. Coming from an Italian and European context where “liberal” can mean market-friendly, technocratic, or vaguely centrist, she pins it to a sharper tradition: civil liberties, bodily autonomy, secularism, minority protections. “Individuals” is a pointed word in a continent that often speaks in collectivities - nation, family, community, tradition. It quietly rejects the idea that the state’s job is to enforce a shared moral script.

“Prospect” adds a strategic twist. It’s not merely liberalism as doctrine, but liberalism as horizon: a forward-looking project, not nostalgia. That choice matters in an era when rights discourse gets caricatured as elitist or detached. Bonino’s sentence answers with a steady insistence: the future worth building is one where the person, not the crowd, is the political starting point.