Leadership Quote by Emma Bonino

There’s a deliberate plainness to Bonino’s line that reads like a political origin story stripped of romance. “Thrown into the Parliament” is a choice phrase: not elected into a comfortable apprenticeship, but hurled into the deep end of institutions that typically reward seniority and patience. The verb signals urgency and a certain lack of consent, as if history (and party strategy) assigned her a baptism by fire.

Then she names the fires: abortion, then divorce. In late-1970s Italy, these weren’t “issues” in the technocratic sense; they were battlegrounds where the state, the Church, and the family fought over who gets to define women’s lives. Bonino’s intent is quietly polemical: by presenting these as her first parliamentary assignments, she reframes what opponents often treat as moral deviation into foundational democratic work. The subtext is that the personal was legislated, and she was forced to legislate the personal.

The line also performs credibility. By anchoring her political identity to specific years and fights, she bypasses ideology-as-brand and offers politics as chronology: a series of confrontations with taboo. “Later on” is almost deadpan, as if moving from abortion to divorce were a routine policy progression. That understatement is the point. It normalizes what was meant to be unmentionable, turning culture-war spectacle into procedural governance.

Bonino isn’t asking to be admired; she’s reminding you what power actually looked like when it tried to control bodies and bonds, and who had the nerve to argue back from inside the chamber.