HE had been up since 6am, but the only sign that Silvio Berlusconi showed of campaign strain as his private jet flew him home at 11pm was a voice made hoarse by hours of speeches in windy piazzas.

Sprawled in a luxurious seat, his left leg stretched out and a generously heeled shoe resting on the back of the chair in front, Italy’s richest man and front-runner to win elections being held today and tomorrow was in a characteristically confident mood.

Even the narrow victory forecast by the polls would represent an astounding comeback for the 71-year-old billionaire who was written off by his centre-right allies after he lost the last election two years ago.

They evidently underestimated the staying power of the first Italian prime minister since the second world war to have served a full five-year term. A pace-maker and an impressive hair transplant have helped to keep him going.

In an interview last week with The Sunday Times, the only foreign newspaper allowed onto his jet during the campaign, the former cruise-ship crooner, who is running for a third term as prime minister, said with a broad smile: “It’s the same everywhere I go – people treat me like a rock star. It’s obvious they see me as the only hope of fighting the left, which is dominated by communist ideology.”

Earlier that evening, a crowd in the Adriatic coastal town of Pescara had cheered and mobbed the “Great Seducer”, as he is known, at a rally that started and finished with dozens of renditions of his campaign anthem, with the refrain, “Thank God for Silvio”.

To stir enthusiasm among Italians who have become depressed by the poor state of their economy – a poll showed that 53% of Italians feel less well-off than ever – is a feat in itself.

Berlusconi’s serious, be-spectacled rival Walter Veltroni, 52, a former mayor of Rome, has also drawn crowds on a 6,000-mile tour – not by private jet but on an environmentally friendly bus – but his rallies have been far more low-key.

Veltroni, who took over as leader of the centre-left after the collapse of a coalition led by Romano Prodi, former president of the European commission, was nevertheless believed to be gaining on Berlusconi in the final days of the campaign. Some private polling put him as little as 3% behind, compared with between 5% and 9% behind in the last published polls two weeks ago.

It is hard to imagine Berlusconi the media mogul aboard an ordinary bus. His Airbus 319, originally designed for business-class travellers to New York, has only 48 seats compared with the usual 115, and bears the logo of his Fininvest family holding company on its tail and the Italian flag on its wingtips. A large Louis Vuitton suitcase stamped with his monogram in gold follows him aboard.

Dressed in a double-breasted navy-blue suit and an open-necked black shirt under black braces, the leader of the People of Freedom party – which replaced his Forza Italia (Go Italy) party last year – began our interview by offering to switch on the overhead light as we sat side by side. With most of his day’s make-up gone, the light revealed deep bags under his eyes but few wrinkles, thanks to the wonders of cosmetic surgery.

Asked what drove him to start his days before dawn and finish at 2am, he gave a throaty chuckle. “Habit,” he said. “I’ve always worked hard. I don’t find it tiring at all. Only my voice is suffering but that’s because I speak up to 10 hours a day.”

His aides must sometimes wish he would swallow some of his words. Sexist remarks which would spell ruin for a British or American politician have punctuated his campaign.

He asked his female supporters to bake jam tarts for candidates, joked about the “meno-pausal section” of the centre-left Democrats, and when accused of bringing showgirls from his television empire into politics, he quipped that he did “other things” with them. He even said that women on the right were more beautiful than those on the left.

Asked about his chauvinistic comments, he replied: “Look, I gave a speech to the women in my party. I said women were better than men at school, at university, at work and even in parliament. They make the best MPs because they’re always punctual and they study hard. That’s why four of my 12 cabinet ministers will be women.”

His remarks on women were only the latest in a long series of gaffes that once saw him compare Martin Schulz, the German MEP, with a “kapo” (guard) in a concentration camp and make the sign of the horns – with two outstretched fingers, denoting a cuckold – over the head of Josep Pique, the former Spanish foreign minister, at an EU summit.

Did he regret such gaffes? “They’re not gaffes. I’ve made no gaffes. The horns weren’t for Pique, they were for some boy scouts nearby I’d just played football with – they were doing the gesture themselves.” He could not help adding with a sardonic smile: “I know the minister’s wife and she’s a saintly woman.”

He prodded my hand and made the offending gesture again for good measure with a grin, waving his fingers inches from my face. “As for Shulz, he was worthy of a kapo,” he said. “I was quite right.’

Did his aides ever rein him in? Berlusconi looked surprised: “I’ve decided to be myself. I’ve become Italy’s biggest taxpayer and I have more than 50,000 people working for me.”

Promptly forgetting his “kapo” remark, he added: “I’ve always been nice to everyone. I’ve never insulted anyone. But 40% of Italians who are rooted in the left regard me with malevolence.”

Veltroni is his chief bogeyman – “a liar” who has not changed since his early days in the Communist party, Berlusconi says. “The British left gave up on communism 100 years ago when the Labour party was launched, but Veltroni’s Democratic party is just a new name for the old Communist party. It’s the same old nomenklatura. Veltroni means more state, more taxes and more immigrants, so more crime,” he said.

As he wrapped up the interview, Berlusconi – who had previously compared himself with Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill – added both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to the list. He paid tribute to Blair’s “huge charisma” and said of Thatcher: “I’m like her. We’ve both got clear, sharply defined characters.”

He admitted that the rough-and-tumble of politics made him think of quitting “every day”, although he had no intention of doing so: “I’m not in politics out of personal ambition. I can see what Italians expect of me. I would disappoint those who have faith in me.”

Berlusconi’s showmanship had been on display a few hours earlier at a 90-minute rally on Pescara’s main square. As his convoy, fit for a head of state with its limousines and vanloads of bodyguards, picked its way through the 12,000-strong crowd, people belted out the campaign song that they had heard repeated for the past hour.

The words were displayed karaoke-style on a giant screen and an accompanying video showed girls buying ice-creams, young women on a running machine, a baker with a tray of croissants and office workers all chanting its refrain.

Berlusconi drew laughs and shouts of “Silvio, Silvio!” when he joked that his lateness – the crowd had waited for more than an hour – was a good thing “because perhaps in that time a beautiful girl met a handsome man”. There was more laughter when he described himself as “a little man who is taller than Putin and Sarkozy” – he is 5ft 6in.

The loudest cheers came when he pledged to “get the left’s hands out of our pockets” and cut taxes, build cheap flats for young couples who could not afford market prices and stop the influx of foreigners “who are responsible for three-quarters of crime in Italy” (at a closing rally in Rome the next day, the figure became 40%).

More applause greeted a promise to go to Naples and stay there until he had cleared the streets of rubbish which has piled up since December, when landfill sites reached capacity and the dustmen went on strike.

Ever the crowd pleaser, he exhorted supporters to shout “Yes” to questions ranging from “Are you sick of hospital waiting lists?” to “Do you want Veltroni to go to Africa and stay there as he has said he’d like to do?”

Among those who fell under his spell was Michaela Forcini, a 23-year-old engineering student. “Berlusconi’s fun, he’s got experience because he’s old, he’s the future,” she said.

The task facing whoever wins is daunting. A country famous for the carefree dolce vita (sweet life) in the 1950s and 1960s has soured. The economy is flat, salaries lag behind Spain and Greece and many people in their twenties and thirties cannot afford to buy a home. Alitalia, the flagship airline, is in trouble and has been forced to cut two-thirds of its flights out of Malpensa airport near Milan.

Both Berlusconi and Veltroni have promised lower taxes on overtime to boost work and reforms of public expenditure. Berlusconi had even promised a tax-free month although he later retracted this.

Veltroni said he would encourage growth by cutting red tape and focusing on the small and medium-sized businesses that drive much of Italy’s economy. His manifesto includes a minimum wage of £800 per month, subsidies to encourage women to work and an annual grant of £1,800 for couples having a child, to be paid until the child becomes 12.

Capitalising on his relative youth, Veltroni has sought to portray himself as a fresh force for change in contrast to Berlusconi. “It’s the fifth time that he runs for the job of prime minister. I don’t think that’s happened in any other country,” Veltroni told me on his bus last month.

He accused Berlusconi of failing to keep almost all his earlier campaign promises when in government and of serving only his own personal interests when in power. On the eve of the election, Veltroni, a film buff, received a warm tribute from George Clooney, the Hollywood actor who owns a villa on Lake Como in northern Italy. Clooney compared him with Barack Obama, the American presidential hopeful, saying he appealed to young people and promised hope.

Although Berlusconi is expected to win a majority in the lower house of parliament, he faces a tougher battle in the upper house because of an electoral reform that he had pushed through as prime minister to thwart his opponents. Polls suggest he could end up with the same razor-thin senate majority that had precipitated Prodi’s fall.

If Berlusconi does win, it will be largely because of the unpopularity of Prodi’s tax increases and Veltroni’s failure to shake off that heavy legacy.

In the industrialised north and the poorer south of Italy, however, many are still mesmerised by Berlusconi’s flamboyant business career and believe that a man who has made himself rich can help them become more prosperous, too. His personal assets are estimated by Forbes magazine at £5 billion.

“Voters are disappointed by what Prodi delivered and by the constant bickering that marked his coalition,” said Franco Pavon-cello, president of Rome’s John Cabot University and a political commentator. “The Berlusconi dream isn’t as strong as it used to be, but this election is about choosing the kind of leader who can make people think that the country can move ahead.”

At his last rally, held in the shadow of the Colosseum in Rome, Berlusconi focused on the more straightforward issue of his love for women: “I’ve hired hundreds of people in my time, so I pride myself on knowing what makes men tick. Actually, I think I know women better . . .”

As the crowd laughed, he punched the air with both arms raised and shouted: “Women! We love you! We love you!”

CAN BERLUSCONI REVIVE ITALY’S FORTUNES?

SAYINGS OF SILVIO

“I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone”

“Italy is now a great country to invest in. Today we have fewer communists. Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries... superb girls”

“I have a sense of humour. I’ll try to soften it and become boring, maybe even very boring, but I’m not sure if I will be able to”

- Italy has had 61 governments in 63 years

- Berlusconi in power: May 1994 - Jan 1995 June 2001 - May 2006

- He is the longest-serving prime minister since the second world war and the first to complete a full term

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