Romano Prodi, Italy’s opposition leader, on Wednesday accused Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister, of damaging the nation’s international image as a row exploded over the premier’s election campaign remarks about Chinese communism.

Mr Berlusconi, whose speeches often contain lurid attacks on communism, told a rally last weekend that, when Mao Zedong launched China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, communist cadres “didn’t eat babies but boiled them to fertilise the fields”.