Nobody has asked Italy?s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, if he has kept his January pledge not to have sex during the two-and-a-half months leading up to the general election on April 9-10. But if he has, then he is living proof that sexual abstinence does not bring political success, because he is still trailing his centre-left rival, Romano Prodi, by four or five percentage points in the opinion polls.

This is hardly surprising, since Italy?s economy is in dreadful shape. Berlusconi sold himself as a billionaire businessman who would turn Italy into another successful business, but over his five years in power, the economy has grown at less than one per cent a year. As his prospects for re-election fade, moreover, his flamboyant rhetoric has become so extreme as to look like self-parody.

In January, he told on a TV talk-show that Napoleon may have done more for his country, ?but I am certainly taller than him?. In February, he switched to being ?the Jesus Christ of politics?. By March, he was comparing himself to Winston Churchill: ?Churchill liberated us from the Nazis. Silvio Berlusconi is liberating us from the Communists.?

Many people would rejoice to see Berlusconi lose, including some who voted for him in 2001, but it is too soon to assume that he is finished. That four- or five-point lead might represent those who secretly plan to vote for Berlusconi but are too embarrassed to admit it even to an opinion-poller. It is unlikely, but he could just squeak back into power.

Laws for changing

Berlusconi may have fooled Italian voters in 2001, but how could a people as sophisticated and even cynical as the Italians still be taken in by him today? The answer is that around half of them are not taken in at all, and will vote against him ? and many among the other half know exactly what he is up to and approve of it.

Silvio Berlusconi became ?the richest man in Italy? under deeply suspicious circumstances. His fortune is founded on his control of commercial television, which he owes to a murky Eighties deal with Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi (who later fled to Tunisia to escape corruption charges and died in exile). The later growth of his empire allegedly involved collusion with the mafia and systematic bribery of officials and judges, and his entry into politics in 1994 was widely believed to be an attempt to escape indictment for these crimes.

His first term in office lasted less than a year, and through the later Nineties a long series of indictments against him and his business associates slowly progressed through the courts. But since he regained the prime ministership in 2001, he has used his parliamentary majority to pass one law after another with the aim of getting himself and other members of his business clan out of legal trouble. And many Italians, knowing exactly what he was up to, applauded him for it.

Most Italians hate the state, and they have good reason. Italy?s bureaucracy is among the most labyrinthine, irrational and slow-moving in the world, and frustrated Italians are more likely to try to get round it than through it. So they tend to admire those who are good at getting round the law ? even the man who wants their votes to re-make the laws to reduce the state to be a servant of his personal interests.

Even if Berlusconi loses this time, his original purpose in coming into politics has been achieved. He has decriminalised false accounting, made money-laundering harder to trace, and given amnesties to tax-dodgers and illegal builders. Most recently, a change in the law has halved the time within which trials for certain offences must be completed and the sentences enforced: as a result, nearly 90 per cent of corruption and embezzlement cases will be struck down. So if the vote goes against Berlusconi this time, he can still retire from politics and enjoy his wealth in peace.