Centre-left coalition senses victory

Italian election: Sunday's vote is too close to call, but the right may be losing ground, says Andrew Gumbel reports

Castellammare della Stabia - If there was anywhere for Italy's centre-left coalition to feel optimistic in the final week of general election campaigning, it was surely here in this down-at-heel industrial town in the Bay of Naples, at a rousing outdoor rally this past weekend.

With the setting sun glowing through the palms and plane trees of the municipal park, the coalition's leaders - Romano Prodi, his deputy Walter Veltroni and the wildly popular mayor of Naples, Antonio Bassolino - were greeted with passion and optimism by an adoring crowd and, for the first time in this bruising campaign, actually looked and sounded like they were on their way to victory.

Mr Bassolino, who has restored badly needed confidence to the chaos of Naples in the past two years, was treated like a rock star; and even Mr Prodi, not the most inspiring of public speakers, was received with thunderous applause. Everything, from their proposals to bring employment to this depressed corner of Italy to their jibes at the centre-right led by Silvio Berlusconi and Gianfranco Fini, met with cheers and ecstatic banner-waving.

"As the campaign goes on, we are getting stronger and they are getting weaker. They want to divide Italy while we will work to unite it," boomed Mr Veltroni. "At the next G7 meeting there will be two new faces, Tony Blair and Romano Prodi."

The rally was an important morale-booster since the centre-left (known by the name of its symbol, the Olive Tree) has precious few strongholds in the Italian South and will be relying on the reputation of men like Mr Bassolino to win over its conservative and traditionalist electorate.

There have been other reasons to be cheerful in the past few days. Although opinion polls cannot be published in the last three weeks, a clutch of private surveys suggest that the initiative seized by Mr Berlusconi in the early stages of the campaign has now ebbed and that support is swinging in the other direction. The new polls show the centre-left slightly ahead, although still within the statistical margin for error.

The centre-right has also made a number of gaffes. Last week, Mr Fini suggested his side might abolish pay-as-you-earn income tax for company employees, only to retract the remark a few days later when some of his own colleagues said he was effectively sanctioning mass tax evasion.

Then, over the weekend, Mr Berlusconi argued that a victory for the centre- left might spell the abolition of free and fair elections in the future - a remark so explosive from a man himself suspected of authoritarian tendencies that it was effectively an own goal. "Berlusconi is not afraid of future elections," retorted Mr Veltroni. "He is afraid of next Sunday because he thinks he is going to lose."

It would be a rash punter, however, to bet on the outcome at this stage. For all the centre-left's advantages - its effective grassroots campaigning, its array of respected senior figures, and the favour it has found with the international community including the financial markets - it is nevertheless weighed down by heavy problems, particularly in the underdeveloped and Mafia-ridden South.

So widely has the Olive Tree cast its shadow, grouping barely reformed Communists with unapologetic free-marketeering conservatives, that it risks considerable internal incoherence should it reach office. Originally, Mr Prodi had hoped that the coalition's great strength would be the quality of its candidates, but the logic of coalition politics has led to a carve- up of seats and candidacies that has - particularly in the South - left plenty to be desired.

Many voters have found that their prospective local MPs are familiar figures from a tarnished and corrupt past whom, they fear, may be susceptible to pressure from the Mafia and other insidious influences if re-elected now. In some cases, these candidates have been imposed from Rome at the expense of popular and effective sitting parliamentarians.

This tendency is particularly unfortunate in the Italian South, which has consistently suffered from clientelistic decision-making imposed from above, and a lack of genuine local autonomy. Nobody is more disappointed than Mr Prodi himself, who according to his friends is keen to establish a new selection procedure as soon as this election is over.

The candidate problem highlights Mr Prodi's overall weakness, both within the power structure of the coalition's party leaders, and as a candidate for the premiership. "He may be knowledgeable and full of ideas, but he is not a communicator. When he opens his mouth he tends to send people to sleep, even his friends," lamented one supporter.