Two years ago, an impressive 83 per cent of Italian voters turned out in an election that neither Silvio Berlusconi nor Romano Prodi deserved to win. Italy's choice lay between a sleek snake-oil merchant who had done culpably little with a record five years in power, and a rumpled political cobbler whose chances of getting anything done at all were slight.
Italians take politics far more seriously than they will admit, and they ended up pitching the verdict just right. Out went the Centre Right, but Mr Prodi's nine-party jumble of centrists, socialists, greens and reds got only a hair-fine majority, putting it on probation from the word go.
The commentariat was appalled - too busy clucking over “a national crisis”, in fact, to appreciate the weight of this Cromwellian rebuke to Italy's entire political caste. Two years later, so loud is the roar of pain and disgust that it will dominate the elections that have, yet again, begun.
Mr Prodi had played on those discontents. The man made a virtue out of being boring, packaging himself as the “serene” technocrat who would keep the politicians in line. This he could in fact have done, by calling the bluff of the unions and the hard Left; they feared defeat in fresh elections quite as much as he did. Instead, he appeased the Left, by unpicking or diluting what little the Berlusconi Government had achieved.
Rather than curb Italy's hugely wasteful public spending, he raised taxes to get the deficits down. Instead of tax reform, he launched a blitzkrieg against tax evasion, which is endemic in Italy partly because no one trusts the government to give value for money and partly because the tax code is utterly impenetrable. Mr Prodi's best decision was to pick the brilliant and principled Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa as Finance Minister; he then failed utterly to support him.
Italians watched with disgust and mounting contempt. Well before it limped from the scene, the coalition's ratings had slumped to the low 30s.
Why, you may ask, is it worth sketching, no doubt in caricature, the rake's progress of that apology for a government? The short answer is that Italy, in these past 20 months, has become a different country.
Different, and angry. Private anxieties about low wages, inflation and other economic woes have intertwined with public follies to engender a mood of despairing introspection, a Gee, Officer Krupke feeling of being just no good as a nation. People have given up hope of a different and better politics. Italians feel poor, they feel old, they feel powerless, and above all they feel robbed by the politocrazia. Beppe Grillo is a comedian who campaigns against cronyism, corruption and in particular against the presence of no fewer than 28 convicted criminals in the outgoing parliament. Not for nothing is he the second most popular man in Italy after - well, after Silvio Berlusconi.
In Italy, a bit like France, to be taken seriously as an intellectual, you must be “of the Left”; it goes with the turf. Mr Berlusconi exasperates and baffles clever people. Surely the man is a buffoon, they repeat, surely he epitomises many of the sharp practices that Italians cheer Grillo to the rooftops for denouncing; surely they saw enough of Mr Berlusconi between 2001 and 2006 to know that he is all talk and no trousers - er, politically, that is. So why the devil do so many Italians vote for him?
A Socialist politician once wryly described to me “the snobismo of the Left: vote for us because we are the good people”. Mr Berlusconi does not do virtuous. What he does do, in the lingo of the bar, not the lecture hall, is talk about things that keep people awake, such as street violence, taxes, jobs and the strain of caring for aged parents; and about how officials are for ever nosing into their lives. Billionaire that he is, he comes over as “just like us, really”. He talks to people. Most politicians talk at them.
So here again is Il Cavaliere Silvio, back in the running for the third time and lengths ahead of Walter Veltroni, the centre-left horse in this race. Yet the finish could be close. What is new is that Mr Veltroni has understood one big thing about Silvio's appeal: that he stands out from the rest of the pack. And he is attempting to steal his act.
Mr Veltroni, whose day job is Mayor of Rome, is the leader of a “new” Democratic Party, forged last autumn by merging his Margarita Party with the ex-communist Democrats of the Left. The DP, he now says, will break with the idea of coalition, fighting this election alone.
This is being greeted as a big gamble, which suits Mr Veltroni just fine, but is actually cold calculation. There was no way to market the same old squabbling bunch as an attractive new team. Besides, polls show that more voters would back the DP if it cut loose from the hard Left. Mr Veltroni goes farther: what he is selling is himself. And a most marketable commodity he is.
“SuperWalter” is everything that Il Cavaliere is not, all bella figura (socially accomplished) to Silvio's brutta figura (can't take the man anywhere). A writer and film buff, he has been dubbed Buonismo, roughly translatable as Mr Nice Guy. He is a luvvie's dream candidate who has put Rome back on the cultural map. He entered politics as a communist (even editing L'Unità, the party paper), but morphed seamlessly into an admirer of the Kennedys. His new model? Barack Obama. He has even echoed Obama's slogan, “Yes we can”, and talks about “turning the page” and “the end of an era of brawls and hatred”. His pitch is that Mr Berlusconi, 71, is the man of the past who disappointed everybody, and that he, a mere 52, is the man of “renewal” . But he says it politely.
Silvio saw this coming. Last autumn he also created a “new” People of Freedom party. It, too, he says, will run on its own as “a single, large, liberal, political force” - and he has coaxed his main ally, the National Alliance, and its popular leader Gianfranco Fini, into his big tent. “We are the novelty of this election,” he indignantly declares. Perhaps Mr Veltroni has hit a nerve.
Mr Berlusconi has to find a better line than “Italy, stand up!” But Mr Veltroni is not exactly “new”. A career politician and deputy prime minister under Mr Prodi, he is the insider's insider; and there is nothing new about the men lined up behind him. Italy finally has a race between two parties. That could bring politics back to life. But it will not reprieve the reputation of politicians. That is the ace in Silvio's pack.
Rosemary Righter, an associate editor of The Times.