ROMANO PRODI, the centre-left politician expected to become the new prime minister of Italy, was not ten minutes into his election rally speech when the audience began to show signs of acute boredom. They whispered to each other, scratched, stared at the ceiling. And these were his most fervent supporters.

Signor Prodi, onetime prime minister and former president of the European Commission, plodded on. “We must unite to move forward . . .”

The oxygen seemed to be sucked out of the room. Even the carabinieri guarding the prime ministerial candidate began fiddling with their mobile phones. Signor Prodi has been called many things in the course of this election campaign: Signor Mortadella (an insipid pink sausage), undertaker, professor, and rural priest. But he has never been called interesting.

Yet Signor Prodi’s lack of charisma may be his most powerful electoral asset, for he is running as the antithesis to the incumbent, Silvio Berlusconi, as flavourless and earnest as the media magnate is flamboyant and dodgy. So far, the tactic appears to be working, with the last polls giving his centre-left coalition a five-point lead over Signor Berlusconi’s centre-right alliance.

Signor Prodi is likely to take power after the vote this weekend, by daring to be dull.

Only in Italy, and only with an opponent like Signor Berlusconi, could Signor Prodi find himself on the cusp of victory. In Europe he is still remembered as a weak president who acted as bureaucratic caretaker to EU enlargement and the introduction of the euro, but failed to stamp out corruption and fraud. As prime minister between 1996 and 1998, he imposed the fiscal rules that enabled Italy to qualify for the euro, but that record has returned to haunt him, with many Italians blaming Italy’s economic woes on membership of the European currency.

To take on the might of Signor Berlusconi, Signor Prodi has nailed together a coalition of bewildering diversity, stretching from Roman Catholic centrists to hardcore communists, along with Greens, radicals, anti-globalists and pensioners. Among the more bizarre members of the alliance are the widow of a secret agent shot dead by US soldiers in Iraq and a Trotskyite who has argued that Iraqi insurgents have the right to shoot Italian troops.

Naturally, the members of the coalition disagree on everything, from the environment to marriage, and so the 300-page manifesto for the Prodi campaign is a triumph of political contortion, desperate to avoid offending anyone within the coalition, and thus ambiguous and incoherent.

Signor Berlusconi has made much of Signor Prodi’s more extreme bedfellows, claiming that he is merely a “front man” for the communists, who will impose swingeing taxes, or else face paralysis. “How is he going to get anything done when he will have Communists in his government?” Signor Berlusconi demanded.

Signor Prodi needs no reminding that his previous premiership, one of the few left-wing governments in Italy since the war, ended when communists withdrew support; these are the very same hardline communists, led by Fausto Bertinotti, with whom he has now made a new Faustian pact.

Signor Prodi has promised to restore inheritance tax (abolished by the Berlusconi Government) and pledged to cut employers’ costs by 5 per cent (although how this will be paid for remains a mystery).

In the end, it is less affection for Signor Prodi than disillusionment with Signor Berlusconi after five years in office, that is likely to hand power back to the Left in Italy.

Nowhere has the contrast between the two candidates been more apparent than during the live televised debates. Signor Prodi is 66, but looks older; Signor Berlusconi is 69, but thanks to the wonders of cosmetic surgery, he might be a generation younger. The stolid Signor Prodi stuck to the debate rules, offering sensible, windy answers to serious questions. The splenetic Signor Berlusconi fizzed with irritation and then, in a typically coup de théatre at the end of the last debate, offered a tax break to homeowners, leaving his opponent no time to respond.

Only once has Signor Prodi been accused of Berlusconi-style vanity, when he was reported to have dyed his hair. Instead of laughing off the matter, Signor Prodi’s wife issued a formal denial: “I have the opportunity to make an extremely close observation of my husband’s hair which is, in fact, slightly grey.”

By their hairdos shall they be judged: the one artificially transplanted and coloured; the other genuine, dull and grey.

A PLACID PANDA

A rare Prodi joke: he once described Signor Berlusconi’s facelift as his biggest contribution to Italy’s infrastructure

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