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Rome: Billionaire Silvio Berlusconi is hoping for a decisive victory over centre-left rival Walter Veltroni in Italy's parliamentary election to boost the next government's chances of tackling a social and economic malaise.
Berlusconi has consistently led opinion polls by about 5-9 percentage points but up to a third of the 47 million eligible voters are expected to make their choice at the last minute before they vote on Sunday and Monday.
"To govern properly I need a huge majority, so that I can take difficult, unpopular decisions if needed," the centre-right leader, who is seeking a third term as prime minister, told La Stampa newspaper in an interview yesterday.
The next prime minister faces a big challenge as the third biggest economy in the European Union continues to trail euro zone economic growth and is seen by the International Monetary Fund expanding by just 0.3 per cent this year.
Investment
US Ambassador Ronald Spogli told a seminar in New York this week Italy attracts less US investment than any European country except for Portugal.
"If Italy, already the tail-end in per capita income and productivity, doesn't do more to boost growth, it risks falling decline and losing influence in the world," he said.
Portuguese Nobel laureate and writer Jose Saramago says Italy has other woes, telling one newspaper it is "a sick democracy where corruption, mafia and crime prosper".
This has not cramped the style of media magnate Berlusconi, who was prime minister from 1994 to 1995, and from 2001 until 2006. He has said during campaigning that the left has "no taste in women" and promised a home-grown rescue bid for Italian airline Alitalia which is yet to emerge. "I need a margin of at least two dozen senators," said the 71-year-old leader of the People of Freedom (PDL) party, who might be lucky to secure a Senate majority half that size, polls show.
The man Berlusconi has named as economy minister if he wins, Giulio Tremonti, who held the job in his last government, does not underestimate the depth of the downturn. "This is a crisis with a capital 'C'. I don't know if it will be like 1929, but we'll see," said Tremonti. The 52-year-old centre-left hopeful Veltroni, former mayor of Rome, portrays himself as a breath of fresh air in Italian politics and compares himself to US Democrat Barack Obama. The reformed communist, a writer and film buff, promised to use 4 billion euros (Dh17.6 billion) from fighting tax evasion to boost pay and pensions "to help families spend and relaunch internal demand to avoid the recession Bush's America is sending us as a gift".
Veltroni, whose Democratic Party is named after its American counterpart, enjoys the endorsement of actor George Clooney, who said on set in Rome he "speaks to young people, talks of hope and of a clean environment - a rare thing in Italian politics".
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