A close ally of Silvio Berlusconi will this week launch his political manifesto, a move seen as a direct challenge to the embattled Italian Prime Minister.

Gianfranco Fini, a former neofascist and now deputy leader of the ruling party, has decided to appeal directly to voters in the same month that Mr Berlusconi faces new trials for corruption. Mr Fini is the leading contender to succeed the Prime Minister — although Mr Berlusconi has said that he will not resign even if convicted. Mr Fini, who is Speaker of the Lower House, has shed his extreme-Right past and adopted a statesmanlike stance, and on Wednesday will publish The Future of Freedom, subtitled Unasked-for Advice to Those Born in 1989.

He observes in the book that Italians now in their twenties were spared communism, fascism and the Cold War. But unimagined technological advances and frontier-free travel in Europe had “not necessarily” made them happier.

Instead, “the death of ideology” has led to narcissism and egoism, with the young disillusioned by politics, which appears to be “a vulgar exchange of insults”. Mr Fini calls for a return to “inspiring vision, moral imperatives and family values”, and tolerance on issues from bio-ethics to immigration.

Sergio Romano, a leading political commentator, said that this was “not just a letter to the young. This is a programme for government.”

Mr Fini was pictured at the weekend smiling at a business conference in Capri alongside Giulio Tremonti, the Finance Minister, who recently publicly fell out with the Prime Minister over economic policy.

Mr Berlusconi, 73, is suffering from scarlet fever and has not been seen in public for two weeks. Having lost immunity from prosecution last month, he has to juggle with two trial dates this month.

On November 16, he faces charges of tax fraud and false accounting over the purchase of film rights by Mediaset, his television company. On November 27, he will be on trial for allegedly giving David Mills, the British tax lawyer and estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, a $600,000 bribe to give misleading evidence for him in court in the 1990s.

Last week the Milan appeals court upheld a four-and-a-half-year sentence against Mills for accepting the alleged bribe. The Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeal court, has until April to decide whether to enforce the sentence under Italy’s statute of limitations.

Despite a series of sex scandals and new corruption charges, there is yet to be an open challenge to Mr Berlusconi’s leadership.

Times Recommends

• Oprah Winfrey says goodbye to her talk show
• Focus on the big issues, not the bananas
• Václav Havel — symbol of national liberation