Marco Pannella

Marco Pannella, 2008

Giacinto "Marco" Pannella (born May 2, 1930 in Teramo , † May 19, 2016 in Rome ) was an Italian politician. For decades he was one of the best-known representatives of the Partito Radicale or the Transnational Radical Party and the Radicali Italiani . With protest actions, collecting signatures and as a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the European Parliament , he campaigned for the right to conscientious objection , divorce and abortion , the legalization of drugs and development aid , against world hunger, the death penalty and nuclear power, both within Italy and also internationally.

Life

Origin and youth

Pannella was the son of an engineer and bank clerk, his mother was Swiss with French roots. With his first name, the parents honored his great-uncle Giacinto Pannella (1847-1927), a liberal Catholic priest, historian and bibliographer. According to Pannella, his actual nickname Marco was not entered due to an error by the authorities. He studied law in Rome and Urbino . During his studies he was a member of the Partito Liberale Italiano (PLI), whose left wing he belonged to. He was involved in the secular student movement Unione goliardica italiana and was temporarily president of the national student union UNURI. After graduating, he was registered as a lawyer, but only practiced the profession for one year.

Pannella was openly bisexual and had a steady partner and several male relationships over the years. He remained childless and was never married.

Extra-parliamentary politics

Pannella as a divorce activist in 1974

Pannella co-founded the Partito Radicale (PR) in 1955 and was a member of the party executive committee. He was 1963–67 and 1981–83 segretatio (operative party chairman) and 1967–75, 1976–81 and 1986–89 presidente (protocolary party chairman). Regardless of this, he was always seen as the de facto leader of the party.

Since the 1950s he campaigned for the right to divorce and for a right to abortion , with which he stood against the Catholic Church. He was a well-known international opponent of the death penalty , nuclear energy , militarism and an advocate of conscientious objection . He also spoke out for the legalization of drugs and in general for the removal of restrictions on personal freedom, what he called Antiproibizionismo ("anti prohibitionism "). In 1968 he publicly protested against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact states in Czechoslovakia and was arrested and expelled for it in Bulgaria . But in Italy, too, provocative statements, demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience led to numerous criminal proceedings. He has been charged, among other things, with denigration, insult, or defamation.

After the possibility was created in 1970 to request a referendum on factual issues by referendum (500,000 signatures) , the Radicali often made use of this instrument. Pannella became known nationwide as a tireless signature collector. For example, they brought about referendums on divorce (1974), the liberalization of abortion (1981) and against nuclear energy (1987). In 1976 Pannella and his colleagues founded the radio station Radio Radicale , which became the most important medium of the radical movement and on which Pannella could often be heard live until his death. Since the 1980s he has been pointing to the social upheavals on the African continent. He often went on hunger strikes , the longest lasting almost three months from April 2011 when he wanted to draw attention to the overcrowded prisons in Italy.

Member of Parliament

Portrait of Pannella as a Member of Parliament (1992)

The then extra-parliamentary Partito Radicale ran for parliamentary elections in 1976 and Pannella was elected to the Italian House of Representatives. There he was group leader of the radicals until 1983. In 1987, Pannella convinced the porn actress Ilona Staller for a top candidacy for the Italian parliament. After a four-year hiatus, he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies again from 1987 to 1994 and was chairman of the “European Federalists” group from 1992–94.

He was also a member of the European Parliament for six legislative terms from 1979 to 2009 (with an interruption from 1996 to 1999) . From 1979 to 1984 he belonged to the Technical Group of Independents (as a board member), after which he was non-attached. From 1994 to 1996 he sat in the Group of the Radical European Alliance , from 1999 to 2001 again in the Technical Group of Independent MEPs and finally from 2004 to 2009 in the liberal ALDE Group , of which he was a board member from 2004-07.

Transnational Radical Party

Pannella with the Dalai Lama (2007)

In 1989 he pushed ahead with renaming his party the Transnational Radical Party (TRP) and, under his chairmanship, converted it into a transnational non-governmental organization that was accredited by the United Nations .

This also meant that he was no longer allowed to run as a candidate for the TRP in elections, which is why he and his party candidates ran as Lista Pannella and from 1999 as Lista Bonino , after the co-leader of the Radicals, Emma Bonino . For the 1994 parliamentary election , Lista Pannella entered into an alliance with the center-right block Polo delle Libertà under the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia . After that it remained independent of the two political camps.

In 2001 Pannella, Bonino and other companions (including Daniele Capezzone and Marco Cappato ) founded a new Italian party in the PR tradition under the name Radicali Italiani (RI), which Pannella understood as an Italian offshoot of the TRP. In 2006 this approached the center-left alliance L'Unione . Pannella spoke out in favor of the introduction of pure majority voting, which would favor the development of two large parties. He therefore welcomed the founding of the Partito Democratico (PD) in 2007 as a collecting party for the center-left spectrum and declared his candidacy for the open primary election of the chairman of the new party. A majority of the Radicali refused to join the PD, whereupon Pannella remained in the RI and was excluded from the election of the PD chairman.

In 2011 Pannella was a founding member of the European Federalist Party , of which he was a member until his death.

In July 2015, Pannella and his longtime political companion Emma Bonino fell apart, whom he accused on Radio Radicale of no longer taking part in radical grassroots work and only being interested in the “international jet set”. As a result, the transnational TRP, chaired by Pannella until 2016, and the Italian RI, chaired by Bonino, also split.

Sickness and death

When Pannella was hospitalized with a tumor, the declared atheist received a phone call from Pope Francis . After his discharge from the hospital, he said: “Thank you, Pope Francis! Your support for us, especially in this Holy Year of Mercy, is extremely important and, as you can imagine, comes more than unexpected for us. We are both brothers in spirit, and your concern for the concrete problems of society moves us deeply. ”He died in 2016 of another cancer.

Works (selection)

• Una libertà felice. Mondadori, Milan 2016.
• Visitare i carcerati (with Roberto Donadoni). Marcianum Press, Rome / Venice 2016.

literature

• Giovanni Negri: L'Illuminato. Vita e morte di Marco Pannella e dei radicali. Feltrinelli, Milan 2017.
• Massimo Teodori: Marco Pannella. Un eretico liberale nella crisi della Repubblica. Marsilio, Venice 1996.
• Valter Vecellio: Marco Pannella. Biografia di un irregolare. Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2011.

Web links

Commons : Marco Pannella  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Entry on Marco Pannella in the European Parliament 's database of MEPs

Individual evidence

1. ^ È morto Marco Pannella. In: Il Cittadino di Monza e Brianza , May 19, 2016.
2. ↑ Le confessioni di Marco Pannella: "Sono il frocio della politica". In: Clandestinoweb.com , May 3, 2008.
3. ↑ Peter Dragadze: Pannella Racconta: "La mia vita, le mie idee". RAI, May 17, 1976.
4. ↑ Gino Moliterno (ed.): Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture. Routledge, London / New York 2000, p. 590, entry Pannella, Marco (Giacinto) , edited by James Walston.
5. ↑ Obituary. Crusader who secured civil liberties for a secular Italy , in: Financial Times , May 28, 2016, p. 6
6. ↑ Marco Pannella. In: Camera dei deputati - Portale Storico. Retrieved August 5, 2019.
7. ^ Entry on Marco Pannella in the European Parliament 's database of deputies
8. ↑ Giovanni Sartori: Citrullaggini e confusione sul sistema elettorale. In: Corriere della Sera , July 16, 2011.
9. ↑ Tommaso Labate: Pannella divorzia because Emma Bonino. La «signora» espulsa in diretta. Lei replica: «Io fuori? Siete scemi? " In: Corriere della Sera , July 28, 2015.
10. ↑ Silvio Buzzanca: Pannella "espelle" Emma Bonino: "Non è più radicale". In: La Repubblica , July 28, 2015.
11. ↑ Deutschlandfunk : Atheism: The enemy is missing. June 21, 2016. Retrieved September 24, 2017.