page_title: Italian Radicals
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Italian Radicals / History / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Marco Pannella in 1992.
context_page_description: The Italian Radicals is a liberal political party in Italy which describes itself as "liberale, liberista [and] libertario", where liberale refers to political liberalism, liberista denotes economic liberalism and libertario represents a form of cultural liberalism concerning moral issues.
  From 2001 to 2017, the party intended to be the Italian section of the Transnational Radical Party as the continuation of the Radical Party founded in 1955 by the left-wing of the Italian Liberal Party and re-launched in the 1960s by Marco Pannella. As the Radical Party had become a transnational NGO working mainly at the UN-level which by statute could not participate in national elections, its Italian members organised themselves into the Pannella List between 1992 and 1999 and the Bonino List until 2001, when they established the RI. In 2017, the TRP broke with the RI.
  Founded on 14 July 2001, the RI are a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party. The party was previously a full member of the Liberal International. According to its constitution, the party "as such and with its symbol does not take part in elections".
context_section_description: The Radical Party was long a left-libertarian movement in Italy, often proposing itself as the most extreme opposition to the Italian political establishment. When Silvio Berlusconi entered the political arena in 1994, the Radicals, who were then organised mostly into the Pannella List and were attracted by Berlusconi's proposed economic liberalism, supported him, albeit critically and without becoming directly involved in his centre-right governments, in the hope of a "liberal revolution" as opposed to the conservative and statist political establishment represented by traditional parties.
  The relationship between the Radicals and Berlusconi, whose allies included socially conservative groups at odds with the Radicals' cultural liberalism, soon ended. In the 1999 European Parliament election, the Bonino List obtained 8.7% of the vote and seven MEPs, including Emma Bonino, Marco Pannella, Marco Cappato and Benedetto Della Vedova. However, the Radicals were not able to convert that electoral success into a more stable political influence, as subsequent elections would show.
caption: Marco Pannella, historical Radical Party leader
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