Named after Emma Bonino, a leading Radical who had been European Commissioner in 1995–1999 (appointed by Silvio Berlusconi), after the unsuccessful "Emma for President" campaign, the list 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 a massive use of commercials, won a surprisingly high 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 by European representation.

[2] The list, which gathered the support of disgruntled voters, women and young people, did particularly well in Northern Italy (13.2% in Piedmont, 13.0% in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 11.9% in Veneto, 11.6% in Lombardy, 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).

This is what happened also in the 2004 European Parliament election, when only Bonino and Pannella were re-elected and were founding members of the ALDE Group.

The "Bonino List" banner was used for the last time in 2004 and the next year the Radicals decided to join the centre-left The Union coalition, by joining forces with the Italian Democratic Socialists in 2006 general election (through the Rose in the Fist), and directly the newly-formed Democratic Party in 2008.