Politics & Power Quote by Emma Bonino

A politician claiming she was "on leave" from politics while serving as a Minister is the kind of dry paradox that reveals how power actually works. Emma Bonino is flagging a tension insiders recognize instantly: the higher you climb, the less freedom you have to play the local game that got you there. Ministerial office isn’t just a bigger platform; it’s a different job with different loyalties. National and international portfolios demand message discipline, coalition maintenance, and bureaucratic trench work. The everyday rituals of local and regional politics - patronage networks, constituency handshakes, municipal feuds - become distractions you can’t afford, or compromises you’re no longer permitted to make.

The line also carries a faintly amused defensiveness. "On leave" is bureaucratic language, and that’s the point: it reframes what could be read as abandonment of grassroots roots into something temporary, procedural, almost dutiful. She’s not saying she outgrew local politics; she’s implying she was reassigned by circumstance and responsibility. That matters in a country like Italy, where politics is intensely territorial, and credibility is often forged in regional trenches. To step away risks looking remote, absorbed into Rome’s machinery.

Bonino, long associated with reformist and European-oriented politics, is also hinting at another divide: ministerial work can mean negotiating beyond the nation-state, while local politics rewards parochial attentiveness. The subtext is pragmatic, even a little rueful: governing isn’t retail politics, and holding office can require suspending the very performance of politics voters most readily recognize.