Barbara Spinelli

Barbara Spinelli (31 May 1946 – 7 October 2026) was an Italian journalist, essayist and member of the European Parliament. Born in Rome, she was the daughter of Altiero Spinelli, an antifascist who was among the authors of the Ventotene Manifesto and a principal advocate of European federalism, and of Ursula Hirschmann, a German antifascist who also worked for a federal Europe. Altiero Spinelli spent ten years imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime; Hirschmann was a German-Jewish antifascist activist.

After three years of research on Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, she joined the daily Il Globo in 1972 and was its Brussels correspondent from 1973 to 1976, also writing for L'Espresso. In 1976 she was among the founders of la Repubblica, for which she reported from Paris. From the mid-1980s she remained based in Paris as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and later as an editorialist for La Stampa, returning to la Repubblica as an editorialist in 2010. From 2016 she contributed to il Fatto Quotidiano; her last article there, published on 10 March 2026, concerned the conflict between the United States and Iran.

Her books included Presente e imperfetto della Germania orientale (il Mulino, 1972), Il sonno della memoria. L'Europa dei totalitarismi (Mondadori, 2001) and La sovranità assente (Einaudi, 2014). Obituaries described her political engagement as inspired by antifascism and by pacifism.

At the 2014 European elections she was a principal promoter of the list L'Altra Europa con Tsipras, formed to support Alexis Tsipras for president of the European Commission, and she was elected for the Parliament's 2014–2019 term. She was vice-chair of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. In 2015 she left the list, which she called a "failed project", and completed the mandate as an independent in the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left. She died in Rome on 7 October 2026, aged 80, while a patient at the Villa del Rosario clinic; the family said the funeral would be private.

Early life and family

Birth and parents

Barbara Spinelli was born in Rome on 31 May 1946, the daughter of Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann.

Spinelli was born in Rome on 31 August 1907. As a young communist under Fascism he was sentenced in 1927 by the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State to sixteen years and eight months in prison; amnesties cut the term to about ten years, and from 1937 he served a further six years of internal exile (confino). Moved to the island of Ventotene in July 1939, he wrote with Ernesto Rossi, in 1941, the Ventotene Manifesto, “for a free and united Europe,” set down in secret on cigarette papers; it treated absolute national sovereignty, not capitalism alone, as the cause of European wars. Spinelli died in a Roman clinic on 23 May 1986.

Hirschmann was born in Berlin in September 1913 into a middle-class Jewish family, and was the sister of the economist Albert O. Hirschman. In 1932 she joined the youth organisation of the German Social Democratic Party in opposition to the Nazis; in 1933 she and her brother left for Paris. She married the Italian philosopher and socialist Eugenio Colorni, whom she had met in Berlin in 1931, at the end of 1935, and with him joined the clandestine antifascist opposition in Italy. When he was confined on Ventotene she obtained permission to follow him, and there they met Spinelli and Rossi. Hirschmann carried the manifesto to the mainland and helped to circulate it. In August 1943 in Milan, after Spinelli’s escape from the island, she was one of the founders, with him, of the European Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Europeo).

After the armistice of 8 September 1943, Spinelli, Rossi and Hirschmann crossed into Switzerland, returning to Italy between September and December 1944. She married Spinelli in January 1945. She was involved in organising the first international federalist congress, held in Paris on 22–25 March 1945, and the couple later settled in Rome. Her federalist work did not stop with the war: in 1975 she founded the association Femmes pour l’Europe in Brussels. In December 1975 she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage from which she never fully recovered, and she died in 1991 at the age of 77.

The wider family

Colorni, born in Milan on 22 April 1909, was shot by a fascist patrol in via Livorno in Rome on 28 May 1944 while trying to escape, and died on 30 May in the hospital of San Giovanni under the false name Franco Tanzi. Before his death he had published the Ventotene Manifesto in Rome in January 1944, with two texts by Spinelli and a preface of his own. With Hirschmann he had three daughters: Silvia, Renata and Eva Colorni.

The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani records three further daughters of Hirschmann and Spinelli: Diana, born in 1944, Barbara, born in 1946, and Sara, born in 1955. Barbara was thus the middle of three full sisters and had three older maternal half-sisters from Colorni. The family into which she was born was already tied to the antifascist emigration of the Hirschmanns—her maternal uncle Albert had left Germany with Ursula in 1933 and later became a prominent economist—and to Spinelli’s break, while confined at Ponza in 1937, with the Communist Party of Italy.

Studies and early research

She took a degree in philosophy. Before entering daily journalism she spent three years as a researcher at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, concentrating on Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe. The institute is a private, independent, non-profit body founded in 1965, on Altiero Spinelli’s initiative and with him as first director, by the Fondazione Olivetti, the Associazione di cultura e politica Il Mulino and the Centro studi Nord e Sud.

The research appeared as Presente e imperfetto della Germania orientale (Bologna: Il Mulino, March 1972), a volume of 102 pages issued as number 17 of the institute’s series Lo spettatore internazionale. It presented the German Democratic Republic as more constrained than any other Eastern European state by Soviet strategy, with little international autonomy and a role as a barrier against centrifugal pressures in the socialist system. The essay argued that the GDR’s internal balance depended on what it called an anachronistic freezing of the international situation, and closed on the succession to Ulbricht. In 1972, as the book came out, Spinelli left the institute’s research staff and began as a reporter on the daily Il Globo.

Journalism

Il Globo, L'Espresso and Brussels

Spinelli began reporting in 1972, after three years of research on Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome. She entered the newsroom of the Roman daily Il Globo and continued to work mainly on Eastern Europe; a later biographical note published by Voxeurop described her journalistic specialisation as Central and Eastern Europe. From 1973 to 1976 she was Il Globo's correspondent in Brussels, a three-year posting she held at the same time for the weekly L'Espresso. Obituaries identify that Brussels period as the end of her time at Il Globo and the point at which she joined the founding of a new daily.

la Repubblica and the move to Paris

The first issue of la Repubblica appeared in Rome on 14 January 1976. Eugenio Scalfari presented the paper as a counter-power meant to be impermeable to outside penetration. In a fiftieth-anniversary account, la Repubblica listed Spinelli among the women it called founders—together with Natalia Aspesi, Miriam Mafai, Rosellina Balbi and Silvia Giacomoni, and soon Sandra Bonsanti—already at work in the Roman newsroom on the fourth floor and in the Milan office, even though they were not in the photographs of the launch. For the new daily she was correspondent from Paris, and she went on living there in the first half of the 1980s as special correspondent for the Corriere della Sera.

She then passed to La Stampa, first as its Paris correspondent and afterwards as an editorialist. Voxeurop's note on her dates the editorials for the Turin paper from 1985. la Repubblica's obituary described the French capital as her privileged observation post on Europe and on the political changes crossing the continent: as correspondent and then as editorialist she followed French politics, European transformations and the international balance of power. A filed example of that Paris reporting is her 7 September 1986 article in La Stampa, "Raid capitalista su Parigi", on French unease at the privatisation of sixty-five companies until then controlled by the state and at the prospect of foreign buyers. La Stampa later summarised the decades of that work as an account and analysis of the main changes in European and international politics, and recorded that she had been a correspondent from both Paris and Brussels.

Later editorial work

In 2006, while she was at La Stampa, Spinelli was designated Giornalista dell'anno for the print section (Carta stampata) of the Premio Ischia Internazionale di Giornalismo. The international prize that year went to the French journalist Jean Daniel; the other journalists of the year included Marino Sinibaldi for radio, Antonio Caprarica for television, Lirio Abbate for news agencies and Ali Haider for photojournalism. On 2 October 2006 President Giorgio Napolitano received the winners at the Quirinale, with the jury president Biagio Agnes, and used the occasion to argue that strong political convictions could coexist with autonomy and a critical spirit.

She left La Stampa for la Repubblica in 2010. On 18 October 2010 Il Post reported that the director of La Stampa had marked her move. Back at la Repubblica as an editorialist, she published on 17 November 2010 the comment "L'Italia del sottosuolo". The piece treated Silvio Berlusconi's government as already finished, but argued that an immediate election or a technical cabinet would underestimate a power he had held not in spite of his conflict of interest as a media owner but because of it—what she called the oil of the mechanism rather than sand in the gears. Changing the electoral law, she wrote, would not by itself remove what had made Italy anomalous; only politics, given time before a vote, could restore institutions she described as offended.

From 2016 she was a contributor to il Fatto Quotidiano. The paper's obituary said that in those years she wrote analyses of the war in Ukraine, criticism of European Atlanticism, and criticism of international, including Italian, conduct in the face of what she called Israel's "sterminio" in the Gaza Strip. La Stampa described the same decade as continued comment on the main questions of Italian and international politics. Her last article for il Fatto Quotidiano, published on 10 March 2026 under the title "Pure questa guerra si poteva evitare", concerned the conflict between the United States and Iran. la Repubblica read the title as a condensation of a recurring theme in her commentary: criticism of the logic of war, and attention to diplomatic and political alternatives to armed conflict.

Essays and books

Eastern Europe and the memory of totalitarianism

Il sonno della memoria. L'Europa dei totalitarismi (Mondadori, 2001, 420 pages) treats post-1989 remembrance as a "disease of the mind." After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Spinelli writes, commemorations multiplied while memory ossified and separated itself from action. Drawing on Nietzsche, Proust and Bernard of Chartres, she argues that Western elites remembered Nazism and fascism more reliably than communism. The cases are Slobodan Milošević's wars and the Kosovo War, German unification, Italy's "pacts of forgetting," Jörg Haider's Austria, Russia from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin, the Chechen wars and what she calls a denied memory of the Gulag, Pope John Paul II's "purification of memory," and Israel.

In 2002 it received the Viareggio-Rèpaci special prize. The German edition, Der Gebrauch der Erinnerung. Europa und das Erbe des Totalitarismus (Antje Kunstmann, Munich, 2002, 440 pages), was a book of the week in Die Welt: Marko Martin described a memory steady on National Socialism and thin on communism. Perlentaucher's digests diverge. Richard Herzinger, in Die Zeit, wrote that Spinelli was not offsetting communist crimes against Nazi ones; forgetting communism, she feared, would weaken memory of the whole totalitarian past. Rudolf Walther, in the Frankfurter Rundschau, called the book empirically loose, vague and redundant.

Presente e imperfetto della Germania orientale (Il Mulino, Bologna, March 1972, 102 pages), published with the Istituto Affari Internazionali, treats the German Democratic Republic as more tightly bound than any other Eastern European state to Soviet strategy: a "barrier" against centrifugal forces, whose life as a nation depended on an international freeze some allies already wanted loosened, and whose leader Walter Ulbricht used Soviet interest to limit interference in the party. In 2001 her introduction to Mondadori's Meridiani edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago called that book a second world of the submerged, parallel to Primo Levi's, which broke "decades of hardness of hearing," and Solzhenitsyn the greatest accuser of communism as realized.

Ethics, scripture and literary essays

Ricordati che eri straniero (Qiqajon, Magnano, 2005, 123 pages) collects four talks for the Bose Monastic Community. Bruno Clarot, in the Nouvelle Revue Théologique (2008), follows them from Emmanuel Levinas and the command not to kill, through Matthew 25, to the Iraq war read with Franz Kafka's peasant before the Law, and to John Paul II's purification of memory alongside Etty Hillesum.

"Una parola ha detto Dio, due ne ho udite". Lo splendore delle verità (Laterza, 2009, 86 pages), titled from Psalm 62, was presented by Elisabetta Ambrosi in l'Unità (27 September 2009) as a eulogy of pluralism: without a contradictor, Spinelli said, no thesis persuades. The end of communism had been met, she argued, not with rival truths but with another single one, which she tied to Francis Fukuyama's "end of History." She called Silvio Berlusconi's Italy "a disastrous dream of unanimism," closer to the mental habits of the 1970s extra-parliamentary left than to its declared enemy.

Moby Dick o l'ossessione del male (Morcelliana, Brescia, 2010, 130 pages) is a dialogue with Gabriella Caramore on Herman Melville. Alessandro Pizzo, in Dialegesthai (2011), reports her account of the white whale as evil inside and outside the self, "fought and adored, just as Ahab adores Moby Dick," and of Ahab as the temptation to be "like gods." Il soffio del mite. "Beati i miti" (Qiqajon, 2012, 128 pages) glosses the beatitude on the meek. The publisher calls meekness active, "reluctant to aggression but not without rebellion." Pietro Citati, in Corriere della Sera (11 January 2013), called the book beautiful and passionate, and noted her claim that a politician can scarcely be meek unless the desire for power loses force.

Sovereignty and the European essays

La sovranità assente (Einaudi, Turin, 2014, Vele, pp. xvi–78) reprints three essays from the euro-area crisis, written, the introduction says, before she stood for the European Parliament with L'Altra Europa con Tsipras. She describes "a field of ruins" and a "Darwinian selection of the fittest." Greece is the laboratory: debt was moralized as guilt (German Schuld means both), and George Papandreou's October 2011 plan for a referendum on the troika memoranda was treated as lese-majesty. National governments, not "Eurocrats," created the troika of Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, and the European Fiscal Compact; she cites the 5 August 2011 letter from Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, and Italy's later balanced-budget clause.

The title names a double absence: national sovereignty already hollow, and a democratic European sovereignty not yet made. Einaudi's text asks how Europe became a dream from which it would be better to wake, and repeats her charge that after 2007 states killed "the solidaristic vocation of the Union." Only if Europe is the place of democratic argument, between states and markets, can each nation "become master of itself again"—a "heavy" Europe with new rules, not a "light" one, and a return to the Ventotene Manifesto so that the Parliament might leave its "sleep" and put economy and currency at the service of politics.

The 2014 European campaign

From commentary to a candidacy

By the spring of 2014 Barbara Spinelli had moved from commentary to a candidacy for L'Altra Europa con Tsipras, a list assembled to support Alexis Tsipras, leader of Syriza in Greece, for president of the European Commission. On 16 April she spoke in Rome at the opening of the campaign that Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL) organised for the list, with SEL's president, Nichi Vendola, the SEL deputy Nicola Fratoianni, and the la Repubblica journalist Curzio Maltese.

Barbara Spinelli at the opening of Sinistra Ecologia Libertà's campaign for L'Altra Europa con Tsipras, Rome, 16 April 2014.

The list had been proposed in January in an appeal signed by Spinelli with Andrea Camilleri, Paolo Flores d'Arcais, Luciano Gallino, Marco Revelli and Guido Viale, and published by Il Fatto Quotidiano. It called for a civil-society slate, autonomous of party machines and not negotiated with any party, though organised groups could support it and propose candidates. A committee of guarantors drawn from the signatories, the appeal said, would not themselves stand, and those who were elected would sit in the parliamentary group with Tsipras.

The bar on the guarantors standing did not hold. On 2 March la Repubblica reported that Spinelli, Camilleri, Moni Ovadia and the historian Adriano Prosperi would be candidates. In a joint statement they rejected the label of "flag candidates" and wrote that, if elected, they would leave their seats to others who had "the energy and the competence" for daily work in Brussels and Strasbourg that would be "beyond our strength."

The list and the election

The vote was held on 25 May 2014. In Italy the list received 1,103,203 votes, 4.03 percent of valid votes; including ballots cast abroad the figure was 1,108,457, or 4.04 percent. On that national table the Interior Ministry assigned it three of Italy's 73 seats, and none to Fratelli d'Italia, listed at 3.67 percent.

The seats were in the North-Western, Central and Southern constituencies. Preference totals published by la Repubblica placed Spinelli first on the list in Central Italy, with 37,056 votes, ahead of Marco Furfaro of SEL on 23,826, and first in the South, with 28,099, ahead of Eleonora Forenza of the Communist Refoundation Party on 22,719. She also received 14,033 preferences in the Islands, where she finished third. In the North-West, Ovadia led with 33,589 and Maltese followed with 32,344. Ovadia declined the mandate, in line with the March undertaking; on 26 May it was reported that Maltese would take the North-Western seat.

Taking the seat

Spinelli did not do the same. In a letter reported on 3 June, Tsipras asked her to accept election, writing that her presence was "more important and decisive" then than when the list was born, and that voters had elected her in two districts. The report noted that if she sat, either Furfaro or Forenza would lose a place.

She chose Central Italy. In a message sent on the evening of 7 June she confirmed the choice, and she wrote that Rome was her natural constituency and the city where she had received the most preferences. Forenza therefore took the Southern seat, and Furfaro, second in the Centre, stayed out, leaving SEL without an MEP from the list.

She wrote that she did not feel she had broken a promise on her own: a pact required two parties, and the electors had not accepted the one she had offered, having given her more than 78,000 preferences. The three constituency totals published for her come to 79,188. Fratoianni, SEL's national coordinator, called the choice grave and wrong, and a "proprietary seizure" of a collective project. Furfaro wrote that "they treated us like meat for the slaughter" and that he had nothing to say to her. Other guarantors divided: Guido Viale and Luciano Gallino backed her, as did Paolo Ferrero of Rifondazione, while Marco Revelli did not, and Vendola declined to comment on the episode.

On 18 June the national electoral office at the Court of Cassation proclaimed Maltese for the North-West, Spinelli for Central Italy and Forenza for the South; the act was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale the next day. She took her seat when the new European Parliament opened on 1 July 2014, in the Confederal Group of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left, with Lista Tsipras–L'Altra Europa recorded as her national list.

European Parliament

Role, group and committees

Barbara Spinelli was a member of the European Parliament for its entire eighth term, from 1 July 2014 to 1 July 2019, with a seat for Italy's central constituency on Lista Tsipras–L'Altra Europa. She belonged throughout to the Confederal Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL). From 15 December 2015 she was a member of the group bureau, and the same office is recorded again from 12 January 2017 until 1 July 2019. Parliament listed her national party as Lista Tsipras–L'Altra Europa until 17 May 2015 and as Independent from the next day.

On the Committee on Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) she was an ordinary member on 1–6 July 2014, vice-chair from 7 July 2014 to 18 January 2017, an ordinary member on 19–23 January 2017, and vice-chair again from 24 January 2017 to 1 July 2019. She was a substitute on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) from 1 July 2014 to 18 January 2017 and from 19 January 2017 to the end of the term. From 14 July 2014 she was also a substitute on the delegations to the EU–Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, for relations with Israel, and to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean.

Reports and parliamentary work

Both reports she signed as rapporteur were own-initiative texts. In LIBE she drafted the report on media pluralism and media freedom (A8-0144/2018), tabled on 12 April 2018, with the culture committee associated.) The explanatory statement said freedom, pluralism and independence from political and economic pressure had worsened since Parliament's resolution of 21 May 2013, citing Reporters Without Borders' 2017 index and the European University Institute's pluralism assessment. The motion urged support for pluralist media, including public-service and community outlets, asked the Commission to treat governmental damage to media freedom as a serious abuse of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, noted the October 2017 murder in Malta of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and called for a directive against lawsuits meant to silence the press. Plenary adopted the resolution on 3 May 2018 by 488 votes to 43, with 114 abstentions.)

In AFCO she reported on how the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union was applied inside the institutions (A8-0051/2019), tabled on 30 January 2019 after opinions from committees including employment, women's rights and petitions.) Debated on 11 February, the resolution passed on 12 February by 349 votes to 157, with 170 abstentions.) It also asked that the Charter be written into economic and monetary policy and respected in the European Semester, that the Commission remove the barriers to EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights identified in the Court of Justice's Opinion 2/13, and it regretted that Poland and the United Kingdom remained under Protocol No 30.

She was AFCO shadow rapporteur for the regulation on the European Citizens' Initiative (A8-0226/2018, György Schöpflin), the report on the future-of-Europe debate (A8-0427/2018, Ramón Jáuregui Atondo) and the report on the Treaty provisions on EU citizenship (A8-0041/2019, Maite Pagazaurtundúa). She shadowed the AFCO opinion of 26 March 2018 on the situation in Hungary, the LIBE opinion of 8 November 2018 on protection for people reporting breaches of Union law, and the LIBE opinion of 5 December 2018 on linking the EU budget to generalised deficiencies in the rule of law. She drafted LIBE's opinion of 17 December 2018 on the proposed Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument. Questions in her name covered the humanitarian emergency in the Mediterranean (13 September 2018), EU–Turkey relations (2 May 2018), Israeli settlement policy (27 January 2017) and Israeli participation in Horizon 2020 (6 February 2018); in the spring of 2019 she spoke in plenary on the rule of law in Malta and Slovakia, on that neighbourhood instrument, and on Libya.

Break with the list

On 11 May 2015 Spinelli announced that she was leaving L'Altra Europa con Tsipras while keeping the seat and sitting as an independent in GUE/NGL. The note said the list had been founded to move past the small parties of the left, to reach people disappointed by the Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement and abstention, and to argue for an ecologically vigilant, solidary Union that would end austerity and the xenophobic nationalisms she attributed to it. She judged the list no longer equal to that project, referring to an open letter of dissent that she and other former guarantors and activists had sent the leadership on 18 April 2015. Il Fatto Quotidiano headlined the announcement as a "failed project".

She said she would join no Italian party beyond the association Libertà e Giustizia, and would not start another fraction, which she called a further atomisation of the left. Parliamentary work would come first, with attention to Italy and Greece: the Union and the euro area, she argued, would be won or lost on the "Greek question", and she would go on defending fundamental rights, beginning with migration.

On 13 May she answered Nicola Fratoianni, coordinator of Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, who had called her inconsistent for taking the seat in 2014 in order to hold the project together and then declaring it a failure. She said the list had abandoned the idea of a movement built through associations and civil society, rather than by the older parties of the radical left. She described Curzio Maltese as having entered that party's executive while sitting as an independent, and Eleonora Forenza as a member of the secretariat of the Communist Refoundation Party, and she named Luciano Gallino and Guido Viale among those who had broken with the list alongside her. She refused to resign, saying voters rather than party machines had elected her, and she cited her father and Sergio Cofferati as independent members of the left in Europe. From 18 May 2015 the register showed her as Independent; she stayed in GUE/NGL, on the bureau from December 2015, until 1 July 2019.

Political thought

Federalism and democratic sovereignty

Spinelli treated the European Union as a political project that had lost the democratic sovereignty its founders imagined. In La sovranità assente (Einaudi, 2014) she wrote that the Union stood at a crossroads while behaving as if it did not know it. Attacks on “eurocrats”, she argued, hid governments that had themselves built the troika that pressed Greece, and the Fiscal Compact, and that had answered the post-2007 crisis by killing the Union’s solidaristic vocation. She wanted not a lighter Europe but a “heavy” one: an intermediate institution between states and globalisation, and between citizens and markets, with new rules and a European Parliament writing the constitution that would put economy and currency at the service of politics, so that each nation might “become master of itself again”. The essay returned to the Ventotene Manifesto associated with her father, Altiero Spinelli.

In August 2016, in a conversation with Lorenzo Marsili published by openDemocracy and by DiEM25—whose site described her as a member—she called it “completely unreasonable” to revise institutions before changing the policies behind a crisis like the 1930s. What Jürgen Habermas termed “post-democratic executive federalism” had, she said, already arrived, and folding austerity agreements into the treaties would not make them just. She wanted a constitution beginning “We, the people”, scrutiny of the informal Eurogroup, and a line between popular and national sovereignty. Wolfgang Schäuble’s post-Brexit “housekeeping”, she said, was ordoliberalism returning as nationalism, and Syriza’s capitulation after the 5 July 2015 referendum was a “primal scene” that had broken belief in alternatives. In 2025, after Giorgia Meloni read the Ventotene text in parliament and said it was not her Europe, Spinelli answered that the quotation had at least made the manifesto known.

Austerity, Greece and migration

On 21 June 2015, in Il Sole 24 Ore, she turned Christine Lagarde’s demand for “adults in the room” against the creditors. The International Monetary Fund, she wrote, still defended structural reforms that the Fund itself had judged harmful since 2013. Talk of Grexit was, on her reading, legally empty: the treaties and the statute of the European Central Bank did not allow a unilateral exit from the euro unless a state first left the Union, which the government of Alexis Tsipras would not do, and expulsion was impossible. Mario Draghi had told the Parliament on 15 June that politicians, not central bankers, must decide, while warning of “uncharted waters”. She cited a 27 per cent fall in real GDP, debt at 180 per cent of GDP and unemployment at 27 per cent, and called the prevailing doctrines “hegemonic and defunct”. Losing Greece would be “geopolitical suicide”, she wrote, not least because Athens was then taking more asylum seekers than Italy; she set the exit talk against silence on the border fence Hungary announced on 17 June. In a December 2013 la Repubblica column she had already borrowed Angela Merkel’s citation of Christopher Clark’s “sleepwalkers” for governments that named the abyss and stayed on its edge.

Ricordati che eri straniero (Qiqajon, 2005), lectures at Bose drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, treated the stranger as the test of coexistence against rivalry; a 2008 Nouvelle Revue Théologique review read them as applying that test to war and to memory. In April 2016, on openDemocracy, she called 2016 the year the Union “definitively broke the civilisation pact” made after the Second World War: since the shipwreck off Lampedusa on 3 October 2013 it had tolerated deaths at sea, and it had now dismantled the Schengen Area and decided to send refugees back toward war zones. In the Marsili interview she added that arrivals that year were about 0.2 per cent of the Union’s population, and that walls and collective expulsions fed the far right and then used it to frighten voters.

War, pacifism and later commentary

il Fatto Quotidiano, where she wrote from 2016, described anti-fascism and pacifism as the frame of her political work, and named her last article, “Pure questa guerra si poteva evitare” (10 March 2026), as a commentary on the war between the United States and Iran. She argued there that the administration of Donald Trump had set aside a negotiation which, on the account she took from Oman’s foreign minister, was close to blocking an Iranian nuclear weapon, and that European governments—Spain partly aside—had declined to condemn an attack she called avoidable. She likened it to what she described as the wrecking, in April 2022, of an early negotiation over Ukraine by Washington and London.

That reading of the Russian invasion was contested in print. On 31 December 2022 Il Foglio placed her among commentators who had questioned the evidence from Bucha and then, the paper wrote, stayed silent once later reporting identified Russian perpetrators. It quoted her column of 6 April 2022: “Perhaps the day will come when we know something less imprecise about what happened at Bucha.” After her death, Marco Taradash argued in Linkiesta that she acknowledged Russia as the aggressor but placed the political responsibility on NATO enlargement, European blindness and arms for Kyiv, accrediting the Kremlin’s justifications and departing from a federalism concerned with Europe’s capacity to defend its freedom.

Personal life

Partnership

From 1998 until his death, Spinelli was the partner of the economist Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani records that his move in the summer of 1998 to Frankfurt, to join the executive board of the European Central Bank, coincided with his separation from his wife, the economist Fiorella Kostoris, and with the start of a relationship with Spinelli that lasted until he died. From May 2006 he served for almost two years as minister of economy and finance of Italy.

The Guardian's obituary, published after Padoa-Schioppa died of a heart attack on 18 December 2010, said that following his divorce from Kostoris he had become Spinelli's partner, and that he was survived by her and by the three children of that marriage. Italian reports used the word compagna: ANSA wrote that she had long been the companion of Padoa-Schioppa, whom it called one of the founders of the single euro, and Rai News identified her in the same way. Il Giornale d'Italia reported an earlier companionship with the journalist Mario Pirani, whom she met while working at Il Globo and who, it wrote, was her companion for many years. A tribute by Maria Novella De Luca in la Repubblica called the bond with Padoa-Schioppa the relationship of her life, after that long attachment to Pirani.

Residence and private sphere

Spinelli's long base outside Italy was Paris. In the mid-1980s she moved there as a correspondent, later an envoy for the Corriere della Sera and then an editorialist for La Stampa. la Repubblica's obituary called the French capital a "privileged observatory" on Europe and on the political changes crossing the continent, and recorded that she returned to the paper as an editorialist in 2010, ending a Paris period that had begun in the mid-1980s. De Luca's tribute adds that she had lived in Paris for a large part of her life.

She also kept a home in Rome during the partnership. In an editorial in il Fatto Quotidiano, Marco Travaglio wrote of "the house in the centre of Rome where Barbara lived with Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa," which he recalled visiting, with Antonio Padellaro, for advice before that paper existed. Padoa-Schioppa died in Rome on 18 December 2010. Spinelli herself died in Rome on 7 October 2026.

Public accounts give little else of her domestic life. In the same tribute, in a parenthesis on the family in which she grew up, De Luca wrote that Spinelli had a son, also named Altiero, after her father, Altiero Spinelli. News obituaries in ANSA, la Repubblica and il Fatto Quotidiano do not mention children. The family announced her death through il Fatto Quotidiano, thanked the staff of the Villa del Rosario clinic in Rome for her care, and said that the funeral would be strictly private.

Death and reception

Death

Barbara Spinelli died in Rome on 7 October 2026, aged 80. The family announced the death in a note published by il Fatto Quotidiano, where she had written since 2016. It thanked Professor Cortesi, his staff and the personnel of the private Villa del Rosario clinic “for the loving care and the great seriousness” of her treatment, and those who had loved and esteemed her. The funeral was to be strictly private, and no cause of death was given. LaPresse reported the same day that the news had also been learned from parliamentary sources.

She was the daughter of Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann. Her last article for il Fatto, on 10 March 2026, was “Pure questa guerra si poteva evitare”, on the conflict between the United States and Iran.

Honours

The register of the Presidency of the Republic lists her as Grande Ufficiale of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, conferred on 6 April 2005 on the initiative of the President of the Republic. That rank, not the higher class of Cavaliere di Gran Croce, is the heading under which “Spinelli Sig.ra Barbara”, born in Rome on 31 May 1946, appears in the Gazzetta Ufficiale of 23 July 2005, with 6 April 2005 as the date of the decree. On 2 June 2005, for the Festa della Repubblica, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi included her among citizens honoured motu proprio, as “Grande Ufficiale — Giornalista e scrittrice”.

The roll of the Viareggio-Rèpaci prize records a 2002 special prize for Il sonno della memoria (Mondadori). On 8 March 2005 la Repubblica reported that she had received the È giornalismo prize. In 2006 the Premio Ischia Internazionale di Giornalismo named her Giornalista dell’anno for the printed press, as an editorialist of La Stampa. On 1 December 2007 in Pescina, Abruzzo president Ottaviano Del Turco gave her the main section of the international Ignazio Silone prize, shared in that report with the historian Paolo Pavone, and praised the European culture of her editorials. On 21 October 2008 the University of Eastern Piedmont conferred an honorary master’s degree in European studies in Alessandria; her lectio doctoralis was “Lo splendore delle verità”.

Assessments

Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, wrote that Spinelli, a former colleague on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, had, “in the footsteps of her father Altiero Spinelli”, devoted her path to reflection on the European project. The Democratic Party delegation called her an authoritative voice in Italian and European journalism and said the death left a void in culture, information and European politics. MEPs of the Five Star Movement described a friend whose often critical voice had kept attention on peace, social justice and European integration; Giuseppe Conte spoke of her passion for the Europeanist cause, social justice, peace and rights; Angelo Bonelli of Europa Verde called her a free and rigorous intellectual. la Repubblica presented her as one of the most recognizable voices of the Italian left.

On 8 October Marco Travaglio, in “La leonessa Barbara”, wrote that she had been lost both to her family and to the newspaper. A June 2026 message quoted in that obituary, and reproduced by Il Foglio, said that her medical situation was worsening and that she was “radically opposed to the so-called outing” of the experience. The same day Il Giornale, under Massimiliano Scafi’s headline “Addio alla Spinelli, dall’europeismo all’estrema sinistra”, treated the phrase about her father’s footsteps as true only up to a point, from federalism at home and years it placed on the moderate left — la Repubblica, the Corriere della Sera and La Stampa — to the 2014 list associated with Alexis Tsipras and to later positions it called more radical. It recalled a 2025 exchange with Giorgia Meloni over the Ventotene Manifesto in which, the paper wrote, she accused the prime minister of “stupidità” while thanking her for making the text known, and it pointed to her writing on what it called the “Russian reasons” in the war in Ukraine. Il Fatto also reported that thanks, after Meloni had said in Parliament, reading from the manifesto, “this is not my Europe”. On 9 October Camilla Baresani in Il Foglio used the refusal to publicize illness to argue that writing about cancer is a civic task as well as a literary one.