Berlusconi, Prodi spar in final TV debate

With less than a week to go before Italy's general election, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his rival Romano Prodi held a final TV debate yesterday, trading insults at will and accusing each other of deceiving the voters.

Neither man appeared to land a knockout blow during the highly regulated confrontation, with a more measured Mr Prodi confidently side-stepping Mr Berlusconi's raw aggression.

Mr Berlusconi, hoping to confound the pollsters and pull off a surprise ballot box victory, stoutly defended his government's record and accused his challenger of being a frontman for extremist Communists who, he said, wanted to tax Italians dry. Mr Prodi accused the Prime Minister of wrecking state accounts, ruining the education system and harming Italy's reputation.

At times the debate got highly heated, with Mr Prodi accusing Mr Berlusconi of being like a "drunkard clinging to a lamp post", while the Prime Minister said his opponent was a "useful idiot".

Mr Berlusconi, a media tycoon who performs well on television when he is allowed to call the shots, is generally considered to have lost the first debate on March 14, annoyed by the debate format which restricts answers to two and half minutes.

He regularly over-ran his time limit again yesterday and was heard muttering furiously off camera about Mr Prodi's comments. But at the end of the 90-minute confrontation, both men appeared to emerge with equal honours.

"It was much more balanced than the first debate which Berlusconi clearly lost," said Lorenzo Codogno, an economist with Bank of America.

Since the last TV match, Mr Berlusconi has managed to regain the political initiative thanks to a relentless attack on Prodi's fiscal plans, accusing his centre-left rival of planning a wave of tax hikes that would devastate Italy's middle classes. He hit the theme hard again yesterday, saying Mr Prodi's financial programme lacked credibility and promising to remove the main housing tax ICI if he was returned to power.