Italy’s ruling Centre Left has been well rebuked over Romano Prodi’s apparent disdain for local democracy. Ten million people, a fifth of the electorate, were eligible to vote in last weekend’s local elections for seven provincial governors and the mayors of 862 towns and cities. Almost 75 per cent turned out — proving once again that the widespread Italian contempt for politicians does not translate into political apathy.

Mr Prodi insisted beforehand that these elections had no national significance, and underlined his point by declining to campaign. This was, on the contrary, the first grassroots test of the Prodi coalition’s popularity since its wafer-thin electoral victory a year ago. It failed the test spectacularly in Italy’s prosperous north, where Genoa was the only important exception in a regional surge to the right, and in the poor but socially conservative deep south. More startlingly, the Centre Right scored first-round outright victories even in “red-belt” regions such as Umbria, winning mayoral races in towns that have been leftwing bastions for half a century or more.

The voting mirrored opinion polls suggesting that 60 per cent of the electorate has no confidence in the Prodi team. Mr Prodi no doubt hoped to minimise the political impact of a comeback by Silvio Berlusconi. But for Italians, the Prime Minister’s dismissive shrug further confirmed the aloofness of a government that gives the impression that “accountability” does not translate into Italian.

Italy’s multiple political parties and hangers-on cost its citizens € 4 billion a year, more than those of Britain, Germany, France and Spain put together. It is a mighty machine for patronage and getting out the vote, but hopeless at governing. What Mr Prodi has given Italians for their money is a nine-party coalition that runs the gamut from Trotskyist to (a precious few) economic liberals and is daggers drawn over everything from gay rights to public spending, taxes, pensions and regulatory reform.

Mr Prodi’s pledges of sweeping reforms have dwindled into a modest trimming of Italy’s huge debts, a lower budget deficit, and an assault on taxi-driver cartels, bank charges, notaries and supermarkets, with hairdressers and petrol pump owners next in line. All this activity is marginal. He even shows signs of watering down the Berlusconi law raising the retirement age from 57 to 60 — folly, since for every 100 Italians under 18, there are 141 over 65.

Voters give the Prodi alliance scant credit for Italy’s fragile economic upturn, and Luca di Montezemolo, the influential head of the employers’ association, Confindustria, says that they are right not to. In a blistering attack last week, he denounced “a new public interventionism born of the conviction that the worst public control is better than the best private entrepreneur”.

As the election results came in yesterday, Mr Prodi set out to prove his point. In a sop to the Left, he gave Italy’s 3.5 million public sector workers, whose pay in recent years has risen twice as fast as in the private sector, a budget-busting 4.5 per cent pay rise, all without securing the productivity gains he had insisted must be part of any deal. It took Gordon Brown the best part of a decade to understand that such deals stoke inflation; the Italian Left seems not to care. Mr Prodi should now be aware that voters do care.