WITH three days to go to the vote, and with all the best available indicators continuing to suggest a desperately "close run thing", both major blocks fighting next Sunday's Italian general election have reason to be worried about an uncomfortable third party, Senator Umberto Bossi and his federalist Northern League.
If all the opinion polls prove correct, then Senator Bossi could well find himself holding the balance of power, a situation destined to cause him no end of mischievous amusement.
For five years from 1989 to 1994, Senator Bossi and his brash Northern League represented the newest thing in Italian politics, a grassroots movement that gave powerful and eloquent expression to the frustrations of a well to do small business and shopkeeper class, based almost exclusively in Italy's more prosperous north.
With the arrival of the media tycoon, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, for an overnight sensational electoral win in March 1994, Mr Bossi found himself and his movement rather gazumped.
To a large extent, Mr Berlusconi appealed to the same electorate conservative commercial classes anxious to pay fewer taxes to the corrupt central administration in Rome while at the same time keen to make, Italian infrastructures more efficient.
Mr Bossi's pivotal role in bringing down the Berlusconi government in December 1994, as well as the invasion of his pitch by the Berlusconi party, Forza Italia, has led many to predict the demise of the league next Sunday. Currently, Mr Bossi's party has 76 deputies and 40 senators.
However, even if the league lost two thirds of those seats, it could still boost up to 20 lower house deputies, enough to hold the balance of power.
Bossi has said that in such a situation he will deal with the Coalition willing to offer most concessions to his maverick, secessionist plans for his northern Italian electoral stronghold.
Such concessions, however, will be hard come by since both the centre right and centre left, while willing to consider greater regional autonomy and various decentralising measures, reject the total fiscal independence called for by Mr Bossi.
Throughout this electoral campaign, and indeed in last Friday's key television debate in which he figured alongside the centre right leader, Mr Berlusconi, and the centre left leader, Prof Romano Prodi, the Northern League leader has given the impression that it is a matter of total indifference to him which of the two factions wins.
One suspects that, if possible, the street rebel, Mr Bossi, will make life difficult for whoever forms Italy's next and 55th postwar government.