'I Feel As Strong As a Lion'

Silvio Berlusconi's behaviour in the final days of Italy's general election campaign has become increasingly alarmist - and alarming. In the past 24 hours, he has used language not heard for decades in a Western European election; language not heard since the days when there was a real threat the results might be overturned by violence.

The state of public opinion is unknowable. There have been no opinion polls for almost two weeks because of a polling ban imposed by law. But, privately, politicians of the right and left alike expect Mr Berlusconi's conservative alliance to lose. He himself aired that possibility for the first time yesterday.

"I feel as strong as a lion and I am sure of winning," he said in characteristically upbeat style. "But if there is a defeat, and I don't believe there will be, it will be an absolutely hairline margin".

What is disturbing is the way that Mr Berlusconi is effectively ascribing the centre-left's expected victory, not to the interplay of the two sides, but to dark, extra-parliamentary forces. Claims by Italy's prime minister that he is a victim of elements acting outside the role assigned to them by the constitution are nothing new.

His difficulties with the courts were never anything to do with the way he ran his business empire, setting up a web of secret offshore companies, hiring a legal adviser who is convicted of bribing judges and an advertising chief convicted of helping the Sicilian mafia. No. They were always the result of a conspiracy among leftwing prosecutors.

Yesterday, Mr Berlusconi returned to this claim at a hastily convened press conference in Rome. Flourishing a sheaf of documents he said disproved the latest charges brought against him, he declared: "There are public employees whose salaries come from the members of the public who plot, plot and plot against the prime minister."

The documents, which can be seen at the website of the daily Corriere della Sera, relate to complex transactions by way of bank accounts scattered across the globe. They appear neither to incriminate nor exculpate Mr Berlusconi, who did not explain at the press conference how they helped his case.

But Italy's supposedly 'red' prosecutors no longer stand alone in the demonology of Berlusconi-ism. Over the course of the campaign, in speeches and interviews, he has gradually enlarged the circle of those he claims are conspiring against him. They now include big business, the banks, the press and even television. His failed attempt earlier this week to force himself onto one of his own TV channels in blatant disregard of the rules on equal air time has since become evidence of a plot that includes his own journalists, who threatened to strike if the programme went ahead.

But unquestionably the most alarming move is the prime minister's clear suggestion that the centre-left is intending to fix the outcome of the ballot. He said UN observers were needed to "defend us from these gentlemen [in the opposition], who are experts in fraud".

His rival for the prime ministership, the former EU commission president, Romano Prodi, responded with perplexity. It was Mr Berlusconi's own government, he noted, that controlled the electoral machinery. "Why fear vote-rigging?", he asked.

Until Mr Berlusconi made his comment, indeed, it had been supporters of the centre-left who had felt apprehensive, as is evident from some of the messages emailed to Guardian Unlimited by Italian readers in recent days. At the root of that anxiety is the fact that the election to be held on Sunday and Monday will see votes counted electronically for the first time in Italy. The system will be used in four of Italy's 20 regions and will affect more than 10 million voters. It will be monitored by a panel including three officials from both sides of the political divide, which would seem to be a guarantee of fairness. So what is Mr Berlusconi up to?

Only he can answer that question. But wittingly or unwittingly, he is preparing the ground for a 'we was robbed' mentality on the right in the next legislature that could deepen still further the already profound divisions in Italian society.