"Even if these are European elections . . . I say that if the centre-right wins a majority of votes, then it would be right to call a general election . . . That is the conclusion the government should arrive at when it finds itself without a majority."
The speaker is the centre-right opposition leader, the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, and the above considerations were offered on May 18th, the day Mr Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was formally sworn in as the 10th President of the Italian Republic.
Flushed with the success of the operation which, in a rare show of political unity, had seen the centre-right agree to vote for Mr Ciampi, a consensus candidate proposed by the ruling centre-left government of Massimo D'Alema, Mr Berlusconi was signalling that he was back on the warpath.
Mr Berlusconi's remarks were an obvious indication that, with the potentially difficult business of the presidential election now safely out of the way, the European campaign could begin in deadly earnest.
Unwittingly, his observations also underlined a fundamental truth about the elections which next month will see 116 different lists do battle for Italy's 87 seats in the European Parliament - that they will be more Italian than European in terms both of campaign issues and political significance. It would be nice to know just how Italians feel about matters such as EU integration, tax harmony, the complex question of enlargement, the future role of the European Parliament itself, the majority vote, a possible EU defence force and many other EU issues.
But in all probability such topics will form little or no part of the European electioneering. Put simply, in Italy the European elections will be viewed as a dress rehearsal at which parties can test their relative strengths.
All too keenly aware of the electorate's growing alienation from the political process - underlined by the failure of an electoral reform referendum last month to gain the necessary quorum of 50 per cent plus one - many of the parties contesting this election have attempted to hide their lack of a truly European programme with the short-term expedient of running celebrity candidates, such as the 1982 World Cup football star Paolo Rossi (Alleanza Nazionale-Patto Segni), the actress Gina Lollobrigida (Democrats) and the Alpine climber Reinhold Messner (Green Party).
The presence of such famous names will doubtless add a welcome touch of glamour. However, the reality of this ballot is that it will focus heavily on internecine struggles in which the most keenly contested vote-counts will not concern government versus opposition but rather the battle between the diverse factions within both the centre-left government and the centre-right opposition coalitions.
As Italy continues its difficult evolution in the direction of a truly bipolar political system (as opposed to the Cold War, Christian Democrat-dominated politics of the 1948-1992 era), these elections may indicate something about the shape of things to come. In brief, they could indicate the future leadership of both left and right.
For example, there will be a battle royal between those centre-left government forces which united under an "olive" branch to win the 1996 general election but which are now running on their own tickets. The most keenly awaited of these contests involves that between the largest government party, the Democratic Left (ex-PCI) led by the Prime Minister, Mr Massimo D'Alema (21.1 per cent in 1996), and the newly formed Democrats Party of the former prime minister and President-elect of the European Commission, Mr Romano Prodi.
Mr Prodi has a mission. He wants to lead Italy unequivocally down the bipolar road, creating a two-party system that would create the kind of government stability so obviously lacking throughout a post-war period which has seen 56 governments installed in 53 years. He and his followers believe that Democratic Left's time is up, that it can never achieve the broad appeal necessary to emerge as the single force on the centre-left.
To that end, he has formed his own party, the Democrats - the name and donkey symbol have more than a passing reference to US politics - with which to continue his battle for a bipolar system. Initial opinion polls, too, suggest that the Democrats could do well, garnering 7-10 per cent of the vote.
Nor is the needle in this particular internal contest much lessened by the still-resonant tensions created by the circumstances of Mr Prodi's downfall from office and subsequent succession by Mr D'Alema last October. In the minds of many Democrats, Mr D'Alema possibly did not do all he could to save his onetime ally.
These elections also represent a possibly crucial test for the Popular Party (ex-Christian Democrat), still smarting from its failure to get its own candidate elected state president (Mr Ciampi is Italy's first non-Christian Democrat president). A significant loss for the Popular Party could well indicate the end of the centre-ground, non-bipolar politics it has so long represented.
Other government coalition partners due to do battle include the joint list presented by ex-President Francesco Cossiga's Union of Democrats and Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini's Italian Renewal Party, as well as the Party of Italian Communists and the Greens.
For the opposition forces, too, the European elections may define a looming leadership contest in which Mr Berlusconi seems sure to find himself threatened by such as the Alleanza Nazionale leader, Mr Gianfranco Fini, or even by the electoral reforming senator Mario Segni, who is fighting on a joint platform (AN-Patto Segni) with the ex-fascist party. For the rest, parties such as the Northern League and ultra-Marxist Rifondazione Communista will hope to maintain their respective 10.1 per cent and 8.6 per cent vote share of the 1996 election, using such a result as an argument against any of the many proposed electoral and institutional reforms that are designed to eliminate smaller parties.
Nearly all of the parties contesting these elections, however, are united by one obvious factor: they all have their own agendas, almost all agendas in which the future of the European Union has a very low priority.