The Great Contender

It is a remarkable thought that when Silvio Berlusconi first took over as his country's prime minister, in 1994, Bill Clinton had just been sworn in as US president and Tony Blair had yet to become leader of the British opposition.

Fourteen years on, Berlusconi is again poised to return to power. Whatever else, he is not the joke figure he is sometimes made out to be. In fact, the outrageous statements that have earned him a reputation for buffoonery - at the last election, he likened himself to Jesus Christ - are often finely calculated, attention-grabbing devices.

If, as Walter Veltroni would like to believe, Veltroni is the Barack Obama of Italian politics, then Silvio Berlusconi, at 71, is the John McCain.

His age is his biggest handicap. But he has advantages that more than make up for it.

Born in 1936 into a middle-class Milanese family, the young Silvio Berlusconi read law at university and graduated with distinction. It was as a property developer that he first began to amass his fortune, creating a vast, middle-class housing complex outside Milan. He first became involved with the media when he set up a station to provide it with cable TV.

Berlusconi may no longer be Italy's richest citizen (he lost that distinction in March to the chocolate mogul Michele Ferrero). But he can still draw on personal assets estimated at more than $9bn (£4.5bn).

He is the biggest shareholder in Italy's three main privately owned television channels and controls a business empire that includes the country's largest publishing house, a news magazine and interests in cinema, insurance and banking, as well as the Serie A soccer club AC Milan.

His ability to shape public opinion is immense and has long been decried by the left (though its leaders signally failed to pass conflict-of-interest legislation when they had the chance). That is not the only thing that makes Silvio Berlusconi a highly controversial figure.

He has been in trouble with the law continuously since the early 1990s, when Italian magistrates began probing the network of links that held together the country's corrupt postwar economic and political system.

He has been found guilty on several occasions, but his convictions have always been either overturned on appeal or timed out by statutes of limitation. He remains the subject of two trials in which a co-defendant is David Mills, husband of the British politician Tessa Jowell.

Some of the charges he faced in those cases have lapsed because of a law introduced by his own second and third governments, between 2001 and 2006. It was not the only legislation passed during that period that helped further his personal or business interests.

By past standards, Berlusconi's behavior in the run-up to this election has been restrained. Some believe he is preparing the way for a future deal with the center-left; others think he may also be toning down his act to be an acceptable candidate for the Italian presidency in 2013. Either way, you have not heard the last of Silvio Berlusconi.