Silvio Berlusconi is old, and Walter Veltroni is old inside,” snorts Beppe Grillo, the comedian whose raging against political corruption has made him the toast of Italy. His taunt strikes a chord; few voters seriously expect this weekend's elections to mark the break with the past that Italy needs, and wants, or to produce a government that will at long last get down to governing the country. Yet that is exactly what each man is promising, in a contest that does in fact offer Italians something new.

Instead of the familiar cast of fractious multi-party coalitions, they have something close to a straight choice between two charismatic leaders, at the head of two parties: Mr Berlusconi's centre-right People of Freedom, and the centre-left Democratic Party led by Mr Veltroni, 19 years his junior and the self-proclaimed “new force” in Italian politics.

This being Italy, it's not quite that clear-cut: each party is a hastily constructed big tent, with tent pegs precariously positioned. One tent houses Mr Berlusconi's avowedly free-market Forza Italia and the conservative National Alliance, and the other a just-married odd couple, the centre-left Daisy Party and the ex-communist Democrats of the Left. Outside one tent prowls the remnant of the once mighty Christian Democrats, and yapping derisively outside the other is a “Rainbow Left” of Greens and still-Red communists that can command a hard core of perhaps 8 per cent of voters. But by cutting loose from the hard Left, Mr Veltroni has shrewdly staked his claim to be a Blairite moderniser, the face of Italy's future. What he is selling is himself.

Thank Goodness for Silvio is the campaign song of the Right, an internet hit; on the Left, it is Walter, I Trust in You. Trust, you would think, ought to be a winning slogan. Mr Berlusconi's extravagant past promises turned out, in office, to be worth little. But there is another novelty. Ebullient showman that he irrepressibly is, Mr Berlusconi has striven mightily to repackage himself as a sage elder statesman, going light (for him) on insults and uncharacteristically asserting that “we do not do, and will not promise, miracles”.

He is deliberately doing “old” - making Mr Veltroni's Obama-like slogan of “yes, we can” sound naive. The trick has been highly effective, even among voters under 30, whom the personable and politically correct Mr Veltroni ought to have in his pocket. He asks slyly what is so very “new” about Mr Veltroni, a 30-year career politician, and that hits home too. The gap is closing, but the odds are on a third Berlusconi victory.

Why? In part because Mr Veltroni cannot quite shake off his association with the privations inflicted by Romano Prodi's late unlamented Government; but above all because Mr Berlusconi still is seen as the “can do” outsider, the man “on our side” against the pampered political Establishment. He may be a fox, he may be a fantasiser, but, in a country feeling its age, he comes across as anything but “old inside”.

Rosemary Righter, a Times columnist, lives in Umbria

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