Italians head to the polls again today in local elections seen as a key indicator of the country's mood following last month's closer-than-close general election.
Almost 15 million voters - about a third of the electorate - are eligible to take part in the ballots on Sunday and Monday.
Voting will take place in 1,268 towns and cities and eight provinces (Mantua, Pavia, Treviso, Imperia, Ravenna, Lucca, Campobasso and Reggio Calabria) as well as across Sicily where islanders will be called on to elect a new regional government.
The spotlight will be on the mayoral races in Italy's four biggest cities, Rome, Milan, Turin and Naples, as well as the Sicilian vote.
Rome, Turin and Naples are currently in the hands of the centre left while Milan is held by the centre right. The voting comes six weeks after Premier Romano Prodi narrowly beat former premier Silvio Berlusconi, who still claims that voting "irregularities" cheated him of victory. Italy was depicted as a country "split in two" after the April election, which was the closest in Italian postwar history and hinged on just 25,000 votes in the House.
Berlusconi said earlier this week that his coalition had inched ahead of the centre left in the popularity stakes, citing a poll he had commissioned giving him 52.8% to the centre left's 46.7%. The former premier, who claims an examination of void ballot slips by parliament's newly-appointed electoral committees could overturn the election result, is leading his Forza Italia party's slate in Milan and Naples.
Prodi said at a final campaign rally in Palermo on Friday that "these elections are not a test for the government - we haven't started governing yet".
He also called on his adversary to stop contesting his election victory.
"Berlusconi lost the election and it's pointless him trying to raise his voice as if he won and we kicked him out," Prodi said. "It's the second time he's lost to me and he'd do well to reflect on that," added the former European Commission chief, who defeated Berlusconi in the 1996 general election
but was toppled two years later by a rebellious ally. The tone of the local campaigning has been as strident as that of the national vote.
Berlusconi repeatedly accused Prodi's coalition this week of "a military occupation of all the highest institutional posts" and said his supporters would "take to the streets" if the government's "arrogance" continued. Centre-left candidates were appointed House and Senate speakers although the naming of majority representatives to both speakerships has been the practice for more than a decade.
In addition, the new head of state is Giorgio Napolitano, an 80-year-old former Communist who was electedon the votes of Prodi's coalition alone.
Berlusconi refused to vote for Napolitano, citing his Communist past. Rome, Turin and Naples are currently in the hands of the centre left and the mayor in each is seeking re-election: Walter Veltroni in Rome, Rosa Russo Jervolino in Naples and Sergio Chiamparino in Turin.
Veltroni will be facing off against former agriculture minister Giovanni Alemanno, a member of the rightist National Alliance (AN). The popular Veltroni, credited with boosting the capital's cultural profile, is tipped to win a second term.
Chiamparino will be fighting it out against former centrist culture minister Rocco Buttiglione, who made international headlines in 2004 by describing homosexualityas a "sin". He was subsequently rejected as a European Commission candidate. The Turin mayor is also not expected to be defeated.
In Naples, the duel will be between Jervolino and Franco Malvano, a former police chief and senator with Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. This is billed as a much closer race. Berlusconi has sought to boost his alliance's chances of unseating Jervolino by standing as the leading candidate for his party with the intention of personally helping Malvano to solve the city's problems should he win.
The centre-right mayor of Milan, Gabriele Albertini, is unable to run for re-election as he has already served two terms and a third one is not permitted by law.
Instead, Berlusconi's former education minister Letizia Moratti will stand against ex-Milan prefect Bruno Ferrante. The financial capital is forecast to remain in centre-right hands, despite Moratti's authorship of an unpopular school system reform.
The elections in Sicily pitch present governor Salvatore Cuffaro, of the House of Liberties, against centre-left candidate Rita Borsellino, the sister of Paolo Borsellino, an anti-mob prosecutor slain by the Mafia in 1992. Cuffaro, a member of the centrist, Catholic UDC party, is currently on trial on Mafia-related charges. He has refused to step down or stand aside in the election race, insisting he has done nothing wrong.
Trieste, Savona, Ravenna, Rimini, Grosseto, Siena, Ancona, Benevento, Salerno, Catanzaro, Crotone and Cagliari are among the other towns holding local elections. Run-off ballots will be held in June for the local elections where none of the candidates win more than 50%. The run-offs are a direct showdown between the two candidates who got most votes in the first round.
