Silvio Berlusconi launched his election campaign yesterday and rejected polls that suggest he has anything less than a 10 percentage point lead in his battle to be voted prime minister of Italy for a third time.
Addressing some 2,000 flag waving supporters in a sports arena in his home town of Milan, the 71-year-old media tycoon said polls that have shown his lead was shrinking were mere propaganda from his centre-left opponents.
"Polls tell us we have never had less than a 10 percentage point lead over them.
"All they have is the weapon of disinformation, circulating false polls ... and circulating (rumours of) false illnesses - but I'm very well," he said to laughs and cheers from a crowd whose banners included one that read 'Silvio - our saint'.
The latest published opinion poll, in left-leaning La Repubblica, showed Berlusconi's centre-right bloc 6.5 points ahead of the Democratic Party led by Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, the narrowest gap yet.
The April 13-14 election was called after the centre-left coalition government of Romano Prodi collapsed in January after just 20 months in office when a small, centrist party defected.
Berlusconi mocked Veltroni, almost 20 years his junior, for attempting to be seen as a new player on a political stage dominated by over-familiar career politicians of retirement age.
"Veltroni, the innovator, the 'young' politician, the modern mayor, who instead of getting a degree got a diploma in fiction, in cinema - he's been in politics for almost 40 years," he taunted.
Film buff Veltroni launched the Rome film festival, a highlight of his seven-year stint as mayor. The intellectual former communist has compared himself with US presidential candidate Barack Obama in his quest to 'change' his country.
A deputy prime minister in Prodi's first cabinet in 1996, Veltroni has been out of national politics for a decade and, unlike Berlusconi who is contesting his fifth election, has never run for the top job. Since entering politics in the early 1990s when a generation of politicians was wiped out by a corruption scandal, Berlusconi has dominated the centre-right through his own Forza Italia party, which merged with the post-fascist National Alliance to contest the election under the People of Freedom banner.
With remarkably similar campaign themes - promising tax cuts and stressing law and order - Berlusconi told supporters not to trust Veltroni's.
"Don't waste your time examining the programme of the left because when the left gets into government the programme becomes something like this," he said, ripping up a wad of papers and throwing it over his shoulders. Identifying what will be a key battleground for both sides - centrists voters - Berlusconi warned Italians not to vote for the Union of Christian Democrats, a small centrist former ally which refused to merge with his People of Freedom party.
"If you want to avoid a victory of the Democratic Party, the only effective way is to vote for the People of Freedom - is that clear? Other votes, for smaller parties, are ineffective, lost, votes that play into the hands of the other side."