Bonino List
| Bonino List | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Leader | Emma Bonino |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Dissolved | 2005 |
| Preceded by | Pannella List |
| Succeeded by | Bonino-Pannella List |
| Newspaper | Radio Radicale (FM radio) |
| Ideology |
Radicalism Liberalism Pro-Europeanism |
| European Parliament group | Technical Group of Independents (1999–2001) |
|
Politics of Italy Political parties Elections | |
Bonino List (Lista Bonino) was a strongly libertarian Radical electoral list active in the 1990s and the 2000s (decade) in Italy. Named for Emma Bonino, a leading Radical who had been member of the European Commission from 1995 to 1999 (appointed by Berlusconi), after the unsuccessful "Emma for President" campaign, it was the successor of the Pannella List, active from 1992 to 1999.
In the 1999 European Parliament election the Bonino List, thanks to its standard-bearer's popularity and the massive use of commercials, won a surprising 8.5% of the vote and 7 MEPs (Emma Bonino, Marco Pannella, Benedetto Della Vedova, Marco Cappato, Olivier Dupuis, Maurizio Turco and Gianfranco Dell'Alba), thus becoming the fourth largest party in the country.
The list, which gathered the support of disgruntled voters, women and young people, did particularly well in Northern Italy (13.2% in Piedmont, 11.6% in Lombardy, 11.9% in Veneto, 13.0% in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 10.8% in Liguria), where its proposed libertarian policies were very popular, especially among disappointed Lega Nord's supporters, while it did fairly worse in the conservative and statist South (below 4% in Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily).[1]
The list failed to join any electoral major electoral alliance both for 2000 regional elections (in which Radical regional deputies were elected in Piedmont and Lombardy) and especially for 2001 general election. The Radicals thus returned to their traditional share of vote around 2%. This is what happened also in the 2004 European Parliament election, when only Bonino and Pannella were re-elected.
In 2001 the Radicals re-organized themselves as a party for the first time since 1989, when the late Radical Party was transformed into Transnational Radical Party. The "Bonino List" banner was used for the last time in 2004, as in 2005 the Radicals decided to join the centre-left camp, by joining forces with the Italian Democratic Socialists in 2006 (through the Rose in the Fist) and with the Democratic Party in 2008.