Italy elections: The main candidates

Italy's general election this weekend could hang on a few votes. We take a look at the main candidates and their parties.

PIER LUIGI BERSANI

Pier Luigi Bersani, the favourite to become Italy's prime minister, is a cigar-chomping former communist with a liberal economic streak and a down-to-earth manner.

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Bersani won a strong endorsement for his candidacy by winning a primary vote in December against his more youthful rival, Florence mayor Matteo Renzi, snapping up 60 percent of ballots in a second round of the leftist vote.

He has also begun to win endorsements in Europe, even though he is still relatively little known outside Italy, with French President Francois Hollande voicing his support.

Currently a deputy in Italy's lower house, Bersani was elected governor of his home region in 1993 and then appointed as industry minister in 1996 in former premier Romano Prodi's first government.

He was elected as a member of the European Parliament in 2004, then served as transport minister and as economic development minister between 2006 and 2008.

He says he will continue Monti's policies of "discipline and credibility" but will also emphasise his own priorities of "employment and fairness" as Italy struggles with record-high unemployment and a grinding recession.

Bersani has accused his opponents of trying to sell Italians "shameful fables" of tax cuts and a bright economic future. "We are living through Italy's worst post-war crisis," he said.

He says his first decree will be to re-introduce the crime of false accounting which was decriminalised by billionaire tycoon and three-time prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. He has also called on Europe to show more "solidarity" and has said the "urgent issue" for Italy now is more investment and new jobs.

MARIO MONTI

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Outgoing Premier Mario Monti, who is leading a centrist coalition in Italy's election race, is a former European commissioner who is said to have saved the country from financial crisis but at a steep social cost.

Monti was installed by parliament at the head of an unelected, technocratic government in 2011 when his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi was forced to step down in a storm of sex scandals, market panic and party infighting.

Unwilling to let billionaire Berlusconi back in power, he launched himself into politics in December with an economic program to "change Italy and reform Europe" and protect the sacrifices made by recession-hit Italians.

His coalition has failed to become the vote-winner he hoped, however, and is currently running fourth in the opinion polls, behind the front-running centre-left Democratic Party (PD), Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party and the populist M5S movement.

Monti is tipped to ally with the PD should it fall short on votes, and could snap up the job of finance minister, a move which would please the markets.

In his 15 months in government he also imposed draconian austerity measures and launched long-delayed structural reforms, facing down trade union fury and outbursts of protests against cuts to education and healthcare. Monti said that Italy was forced to swallow "a bitter medicine" because "an aspirin" was not enough after years of mismanagement of public finances.

Italians have generally enjoyed their country's new-found international credibility and an end to Berlusconi's endless sex scandals. But Monti soporific speeches have hardly set pulses racing and a well-known comedian has become popular with his impressions of Monti as a 'robot'.

SILVIO BERLUSCONI

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Italy's irrepressible Silvio Berlusconi, whose rise in the polls ahead of a general election next week puts him in contention for the prime minister's chair once again, is a larger-than-life billionaire.

The 76-year-old has shrugged off scandal to score political triumphs time and again and is currently in second place, just a few points behind the main centre-left Democratic Party led by his ex-communist rival Pier Luigi Bersani.

Despite lurid allegations surrounding his sex life and multiple trials for fraud, Berlusconi's image as a businessman fighting the establishment has endured in Italy throughout a stormy political career. He has been prime minister three times during his two decades in politics. His first stint as prime minister in 1994 lasted only a few months.

In 2001 however, he was elected again, after a media campaign which included sending a book boasting of his achievements to 15 million Italian homes. He remained in power until 2006 -- the longest premiership in the history of post-war Italy -- and as a divided left floundered, he was voted back in for a third time in 2008.

Berlusconi's political success and growing influence as a broadcasting tycoon have been closely entwined: the media magnate wooed millions of Italians, from disgruntled housewives to sports fans, through his vast television empire.

Despite some initial convictions for fraud, all but one of many legal cases against him have so far been won on appeal. Others have simply fallen foul of the statute of limitations in Italy's notoriously slow-moving legal system.

In October last year Berlusconi was sentenced to jail for tax fraud -- a conviction he is now appealing. He is also on trial for having sex with an underage prostitute and abusing the powers of his office.

Italy's richest person between 1996 and 2008, the party-loving premier has been embroiled in a string of scandals. Details emerged of vast sums that Berlusconi had lavished on young escorts. While his clownish behaviour may have amused some Italians, it has on several occasions got him into hot water on the international scene.

Berlusconi was finally ousted from the premiership in 2011 to the relief of his critics, who said his leadership had been disastrous for the economy. But many predicted he could not stand being out of the limelight for long.

OSCAR GIANNINO

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Leader of "Stop the Decline" Party Oscar Giannino is an eccentric journalist who became popular with a radio show in which he signed off by shouting "Basta!" ("Enough!).

His radical free-market campaign is chipping away at support for Silvio Berlusconi and could determine whether the former prime minister wins in the battleground region of Lombardy. His party in the most recent polls got just 1.0 percent, although the percentage is higher in the state of Lombardy.

Giannino is calling for massive privatisation, a radical re-think of the tax system and an overhaul of bank oversight to prevent crises like the one threatening Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the third largest bank.

"The only priority should be large-scale sell-offs," Giannino, looking like a foppish 19th century stationmaster in a red waistcoat with a purple silk pocket square, told the foreign press corps in Rome earlier this month.

In one live interview on Rai Uno, the main public television channel, he wrapped himself up in a long metal chain to show the burden of taxes on Italians.

He has even written a play that is touring Italy as part of his campaign, "An Italian Dinner", which tells the story of a dysfunctional family where everyone wants to vote for different candidates until Giannino appears on the scene. At one recent rally, he quoted Mahatma Gandhi saying: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win."

ANTONIO INGROIA

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Antonio Ingroia, who has set up a party called "Civic Revolution" with traditionally leftist and anti-corruption slogans that are winning over voters disillusioned with the mainstream.

"We're the only real left-wing," the 53-year-old Ingroia said in one recent interview. He said the prospect of an alliance between the Democratic Party and outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti would be "a mortal embrace". "They accuse me of making the left lose but I ask: 'What left?'"

Ingroia's party is only polling at around 4.2 per cent on a national level. That would be just enough to scrape into the lower house of parliament but perhaps sufficient to make a more dramatic difference to the fate of the Democratic Party, which is the current election favourite.

Ingroia has called for the scrapping of Monti's pension reforms, for a minimum wage for young people and for an increase in child benefits. He says he can fund his plans by fighting tax evasion and seizing what he says are 170 billion euros ($227 billion) in untouched criminal assets.

He has said that "moral" issues like "transparency, legality, the fight against the mafia and corruption" should be at the centre of the campaign.

BEPPE GRILLO

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A comedian since the 1970s, Beppe Grillo started to mobilise huge crowd since 2007, without belonging to any party.

In 2010, he started a political movement called "Movimento 5 stelle" ("Movement Five Stars"), declaring he didn't have a desire to be a leader and to be elected, but had only the intent to bring together, through internet, people who believed in honesty and direct democracy.

The five stars cover its members' main interests: water, transport, development, internet availability and the environment. Its policies are also strong on corporate governance and market transparency.

Grillo has been drawing crowds across Italy with a grassroots campaign that appeals to many voters disillusioned by politics and impacted by recent austerity measures. He maintains a blog (available in Italian, English, and Japanese) at beppegrillo.it which is updated daily.

Comments to posts regularly top the thousands (in the Italian version). In 2008, The Guardian ranked Grillo's blog among the world's most powerful blogs.

While most politicians focus on television, but Mr Grillo campaigns in a way that is traditional yet contemporary: rallies in packed piazzas live-streamed on YouTube. The M5S has its “feet on the ground, but its head on the web”, he told the Economist.

Political expert Roberto D'Alimonte said Grillo, whose acolytes are referred to as "grillini", could garner as much as 20 percent of the vote, which would put his Five Star Movement in third place behind Bersani and Berlusconi and ahead of Monti.

"Recently, Grillo has also been stealing votes away from Berlusconi" -- not just the left, D'Alimonte said, adding that this might favour Bersani.