ITALY:"I AM MAD," says media tycoon and centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi.
"At my age [ 71], what am I doing here, contesting another general election?" he asks rhetorically of a gathering of businessmen in Viterbo, north of Rome last Wednesday.
The answer is soon forthcoming. He is doing it, he says, out of a sense of responsibility to the country and because there is no one to take his place.
Not everyone sees his motivation as quite so altruistic. Many point out that he was doing handstands in delight when Romano Prodi's centre-left government fell last January, since it offered him a last chance at government.
In the months before Prodi's fall, his hold on the centre-right had begun to shake, with allies suggesting that the time had come for a new leader. Before there was a serious mutiny in the ranks, however, Prodi fell.
With no new centre-right leader in position, he was back in the saddle, doing arguably the thing he does best in political life, namely masterminding an election campaign. What is more, he was doing it with an initial huge lead of 15-16 points over his major centre-left opponent, former Rome mayor Walter Veltroni, leader of the Democratic Party (PD).
Yet, so far, this campaign has not gone entirely to plan. Veltroni has run a bright, US-style campaign, touring the country in a bus, never missing an opportunity to stand on a rally platform with a candidate under 30 years old at his side and adopting a fair-minded tone that eschews almost any reference to Berlusconi's controversial past. Opinion polls suggest that the gap between the two major candidates has shrunk to five or six points and could shrink further.
If such considerations worry Berlusconi (and they almost certainly do), he is hiding it well. In Viterbo, he considers himself amongst his own. He, too, is a businessman, he says, someone "who started from zero" and made his own way.
No doubt his audience would like to think they could do as well as him and end up as Italy's second-richest man (according to US review Forbes), with assets close to $10 billion.
No doubt, too, they would like to think they could look so energetic and sound so plausible at his age. Talking without notes, he gives a masterful, fluent, hour-long performance, managing to outline his party's programme while at the same time belittling his opponents - and all without any apparent hesitation or uncertainty.
Poor old Veltroni, he says, he is exhausted travelling up and down the country in that old bus. Then, too, he decides to have a meal with an "ordinary" family everywhere he goes. Who knows what they have been giving him to eat? Little wonder that he is a bit out of sorts, he comments to resounding laughter.
Yet Berlusconi has been feeling the pressure of "chasing" the new-look Veltroni. To that end, he too has changed his look, opting for the "casual" and addressing some rallies in a fashionable open-necked shirt. More significantly, perhaps, he seems to have changed his tone.
He began this campaign with a moderate, fair-minded tone that seemed in part dictated by his main rival. As we come down to the wire and as his lead seems less secure, he has adopted familiar, old, commies-under-the-bed tactics.
The Democratic Party, he said in Viterbo, is just the latest version of the old PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano). They are still motivated by Marxist orthodoxy on the left, they distrust private property and they consider the police force "traitors" who have sold out to the bourgeois state.
Former investigating magistrate Antonio Di Pietro, of the IDV (electoral allies of the PD), is a "horrible" man, someone who, during the infamous Tangentopoli investigation of the early 1990s, was happy to throw "innocent" people into jail.
As for the left's ability to govern, you have just to look at the rubbish crisis in Naples, where the left has been in power for the last 14 years, to see what a "disaster" it has achieved. The damage done to Italy's tourist industry by TV images all round the world of rubbish rotting on the streets of Naples is just "immense".
Even the way the Prodi government has "mishandled" the sale of national carrier Alitalia has caused damage to the country. Here, in fairness, it has to be said there are many who have serious reservations about the cavalier manner in which Berlusconi has dragged Alitalia into the electoral debate.
He has consistently suggested that it would be possible to form an Italian consortium to buy the ailing carrier, without actually naming the investors.
Last week he even suggested that his children would be willing to invest in such an Italian consortium, only to this week exclude that possibility.
In contrast to the way the left governs, he says, just look at his record in government (he was prime minister for nine months in 1994 and then a second time from 2001 to 2006).
"When I went to my first EU summits, people had no respect for me. But then, bit by bit, my personality, my standing and my capacities began to come through. By the time I left the EU, having been president for a term, I can tell you that, along with Tony Blair, I was the major player. Many times, I had a major say in important summit decisions. Today, however, we simply don't count in Europe."
Historians might beg to differ, especially on the "successes" of his term of office as EU president, but our Silvio has no doubts. He is The Man. "He is doing it, he says, out of a sense of responsibility to the country