Italy fears for the life of its great eccentric

He is Italy's best-known social campaigner. But now Marco Pannella (right) may be fighting his last battle. Undaunted by a stroke a week ago, he has gone on hunger strike to protest at his lack of exposure on the Italian media. Andrew Gumbel in Rome explains the extraordinary response to Mr Pannella's gamble with his health.

Marco Pannella is a man who has long devoted body and soul to political causes. In the Seventies, his Radical Party forced divorce and abortion onto the Italian statute books. More recently he has willingly allowed himself to be slung in jail for distributing hashish on the streets, all in the name of decriminalising the market in soft drugs.

Ask most Italians about him and they will say he has gone a bit soft himself. He certainly does not attract much in the way of voter support these days. But his decision to stop eating so soon after suffering a brain haemorrhage has made Italy rally to the defence of one of its great eccentrics.

Party leader after party leader, the establishment has spent the weekend begging him to give up his gesture. The Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, phoned him on Saturday and even acknowledged he was right to say he was being ignored by the major television networks. The chairman of the parliamentary media commission invited him to make his feelings formally known this morning - preferably on a full stomach.

But Mr Pannella has decided that he will not be fobbed off. Heartened by the reaction to his protest, he has agreed to continue taking liquids and even checked himself into hospital to have his metabolism monitored. But no food has passed his lips since midnight on Friday. And 300 diehard supporters have since joined his hunger strike in sympathy.

In a country of molly-coddled politicians and largely molly-coddled voters, Mr Pannella's willingness to take real risks comes as a breath of fresh air. Whether his own media exposure is an issue worth gambling his life for is another matter. As the canny old man of post-war Christian Democracy, Giulio Andreotti, wrote to him over the weekend: "You can't run any campaigns when you are dead."

Mr Pannella's big political innovation was to exploit the fine print of the Italian constitution to call referendums by public acclaim and so bypass an efficient and corrupt parliament. Since the early Seventies he has been gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to force plebiscites on everything from divorce and abortion to hunting, shooting and fishing.

He lost his edge in the 1987 general elections, when he allowed the pornography actress La Cicciolina to run on his party's list as a way of illustrating the bankruptcy of Italian democracy. La Cicciolina was elected, and proceeded to embarrass everyone - Mr Pannella included - by stripping in public at every opportunity.

In recent years, Mr Pannella has called so many referendums - many of them abstruse and incomprehensible - that the tactic has outlived its usefulness. Despite waning support, his knack for arresting campaigns has continued: in the last few weeks he has taken to the streets to distribute both marijuana and big banknotes - the latter a protest against the big state subsidies enjoyed by political parties, including his own.