ROME — ­This is the Coney Island of Italian election campaigns, a gaudy amusement park where the magic mirrors, carny barkers and roller coasters do not quite conceal the slightly ominous underbelly. It will be a relief when the two days of national general elections end April 10.

The relief will be only partial, however. Within a few weeks local elections take place all over Italy. As if this were not enough, the new Parliament must then elect a new president for a seven-year term. This triple-whammy coincidence has raised the stakes higher than in normal elections, and sent the rhetoric to fever pitch. Even if Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing team flops miserably in the general elections April 9-10 — as almost everyone except Berlusconi is now predicting — he will still have 100 or so of his faithful in the 630-member Parliament and 60 in the 315-member Senate condition the necessary two-thirds vote for a president to replace the outgoing octogenerian Presifdent Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

Our Cupie doll for the trashiest turn of phrase passes from last month’s winner Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the dictator, (for her declaration, “better Fascist than queer”) to Berlusconi ally Umberto Bossi, the leader of the ultra-nationalist and racist Northern League. Bossi was, alas, sufficiently recovered from a recent stroke to make this historic pronouncement about the left alliance led by Romano Prodi, accused of being tolerant toward same-sex marriage: “They smell of Vaseline.”

Tensions came to the point that, at a meeting of the Confindustria, Italy’s national association of manufacturers, famous shoe manufacturer Diego Della Valle (dubbed “the Italian Ralph Lauren“) and Berlusconi exchanged insults publicly after the Premier, in his speech, accused Della Valle and other entrepreneurs who support the left of “having skeletons in their closets.” Afterward a group of rightists announced they would organize a boycott of the pricy shoes made by Della Valle’s company, Tod’s, an Italian version of Timberland. And Pierro Fassino, the leader of the (ex-Communist) Party of the Democratic Left — the largest party in the center-left opposition coalition — then accused Berlusconi of “verbal violence and intimidation.”

Berlusconi himself, no mean hand at insults, called the journalists who went on a two-day strike members of a “soviet.” The strike was over higher wages. And in a speech Sunday morning (yesterday) in Naples, Berlusconi described his chief opponent Prodi, leader of the center-left Unione coalition, as “a delusional poveraccio who thinks he matters.” In this case, “poveraccio” means “poor oaf“, and the working word is ‘poor.” For the Premier, Professor Prodi is an insignificant front man — “a mask,” Berlusconi called him — for an array of dangerous far leftists. Just how dangerous? Well, in another rhetorical low, Berlusconi went on record in a speech in Naples saying that “the Communists don’t eat babies–they boil them.”

In the past Berlusconi has pointed out that he is one of the anointed of the Lord, or otherwise, despite his alleged persecution by an evil alliance of media, manufacturers, bankers, and communist judges, he would not personally be as rich and powerful as he is now. But there’s the point: what happens to Berlusconi if he loses power in two weeks time? Forget the “Commie” magistrates (as Silvio calls them) and their on-going cases against Berlusconi: will the richest man in Italy actually lose what counts most, money? His hypothetical sobering-up after the party is increasingly under debate and a key reason for the heat. Berlusconi fears, as he has said, that the first thing Prodi will do in office is to seize the broadcasting licenses for Berlusconi-owned Mediaset networks and hand them over to his friends on the left. What the Prodi crowd is expected to do is to take steps to make it easier for the three state-owned TV networks under the RAI umbrella to compete for advertising with the Berlusconi enterprises. At the moment, RAI is squeezed by concessions provided to Mediaset. “Anti-trust legislation has to begin here,” says the left’s ex-Premier Massimo D’Alemma.

At this point the U.S. State Department entered the fray, warning American citizens that, in the present climate in Italy, they would do well to avoid crowds and must remain on the alert for danger, reporting their suspicions to their consulates or the Italian police. Does this warning mean American tourists here for Easter are to look out for the odd black-bloc nut case? Look for a bomb? If so, whose bomb: an Italian’s? or an Islamist kamikaze’s? How look for these, when the Israelis, presumably well trained in this, can only rarely spot a kamikaze? Berlusconi slightly soft-pedaled the warning. “This hostility toward the U.S., this hatred,” Silvio said, ” is so strong that if a U.S. citizen found himself in the middle of a left-wing demonstration, he could not feel easy.”

Also called to task was the Minister of Justice, a Berlusconi ally named Roberto Castelli, who spoke bluntly of a possible bombing during these coming days. However, he said, a bombing “would only help the victory” of Berlusconi’s coalition, “and so I don’t think it will happen.” All Islam knows that the Italian left is pro-Islam, he added direly.

Predictably, the center-left candidates all rounded on Berlusconi, Castelli and the U.S., accused of outrageous interference. The most extreme view was that the State Department warning signaled a revival of the notorious “strategy of tensions” 1970s-style, by which the extreme right promotes turbulence in order to justify a crack-down. [For a 1975 description of the “strategy of tensions” by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his Coriere della Serra column, click here.] But Prodi’s colorless style is to remain calm, and so he limited himself to being annoyed and suggesting that the warning was probably piloted by Berlusconi himself.

To this an irate Berlusconi replied, “I think that the U.S. government should be free to tell its citizens to take care during an election period when there are strong counter-positions. It’s only natural that the U.S. says to stay away. And if Prodi thinks that the State Deprtment note is interference, I think exactly the opposite. Prodi’s comments are an improper interference in the interests of another state.”

The question remains: what is going on? Is there serious reason for Americans and, for that matter, for Italians to be nervous in these final days?

Just possibly. A Europol report, made public this weekend by police in Brussels, warns that three hundred radical Islamic activists, most of whom hold European passports, have secretly entered European countries. In an obviously related capillary sweep all over Italy this weekend, police hauled in several hundred suspects, arrested at least four and deported 20. Lastly, newspapers have been running full-page articles of reassurance detailing the sophistication of the brand new TV security system operating on Italian subways. Since its installation in November, say police, the number of pickpocket attacks in Rome alone have been halved. Subway security, Europol warnings, arrests of unnamed Islamic militants, and extremist rhetoric from the ruling government coalition is the slightly spooky underbelly of a nervous count-down to election day.

But money talks — and billionaire Berlusconi has just sent to 11 million Italian households a luxurious 160-page magazine — lavishly illustrated with hundreds of photos of himself, his family, and with celebrities — vaunting his record as premier since 2001.

This is the latest in a series of special reports on Italy’s impending elections by DIRELAND‘s Rome correspondent Judy Harris — a veteran ex-pat journalist and former staffer in Italy for the Wall Street Journal and TIME magazine. Read Judy Harris’s previous LETTERS FROM ROME for DIRELAND: October 1, 2005, “Italy–The Church Re-Enters Politics.” July 22, 2005 — Judges On Strike Against Berlusconi; June 13, 2005 — Italy’s Referendum a Fiasco; June 11, 2005 — Italy’s Referendum: It’s Really About Abortion …. AND JUDY’S OTHER SPECIAL ELECTION REPORTS: March 6, 2006 — Will Berlusconi Lose?; March 9, 2006: Italian Elections: What a Difference a Week Makes; March 12, 2006 — Italy’s Bizarre Election Campaign: Silvio’s Spies and Cartoon Fairy Tale Videos; March 14, 2006 — The Berlusconi-Prodi TV Debate; March 15, 2006 — After the Debate.

---