Italian elections Silvio Berlusconi
The billionaire entrepreneur, media tycoon and centre-right opposition leader is fighting his fifth election campaign at the age of 71 in a bid for a final, third term as prime minister.
In the last elections, in 2006, his coalition lost by the narrowest of margins, just 24,000 votes. This time around he has started his campaign with a comfortable lead in opinion polls.
Walter Veltroni
Walter Veltroni, the new Democratic party’s candidate for prime minister, has evolved from a young communist activist in the 1970s into a leading centre-left reformist. Nearly 20 years younger than his centre-right rival, Silvio Berlusconi, Mr Veltroni is able to portray himself as the new man. In reality he has been in politics twice as long, and in his suit and round glasses he even looks far more old fashioned
Fausto Bertinotti
Fausto Bertinotti, the Rainbow Left coalition’s candidate for prime minister, appears set to return to his familiar role of opposition communist after two spells in centre-left governments that were both cut short by coalition infighting.
Although he is sometimes referred to as the “cashmere communist” for his fine dress sense and old-fashioned courtesy, Mr Bertinotti, 68, has a history of hardline trade union and party activism.
Pier Ferdinando Casini
Pier Ferdinando Casini, leader of the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC), heads a small centrist Catholic party hemmed in by left and right but aiming to be big enough to negotiate itself into a coalition government in the event of a close election result.
The 52-year old Casini bills himself as a moderate and his party untainted by corruption scandals.
Gianfranco Fini
Gianfranco Fini has cut his party’s Fascist roots, moving the National Alliance into the conservative mainstream and positioning himself as the natural successor to Silvio Berlusconi as future leader of Italy’s centre-right.
Fini is a shrewd politician, making a long journey to respectability that has taken him from praising Mussolini in 1994 as the “greatest statesman of the 20th century” to denouncing Fascism as an “absolute evil” in a landmark visit to Israel in November 2003.
