Italy dissolved its parliament on Saturday and scheduled elections for early April, opening what promises to be a bitter campaign that pits Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi against a strong center-left opponent.
The government set the dates during a Cabinet meeting minutes after the Italian president signed a decree that dissolved parliament, ending a five-year legislature.
The election dates of April 9-10 had been agreed upon in previous weeks between Berlusconi and the president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Opposition leaders had also signed off on the date.
Parliament ended two weeks later than originally planned, after Berlusconi negotiated a delay that allowed his government to rush through a flurry of last-minute legislation.
It also allowed the premier to keep up a barrage of TV and radio appearances, which will be limited during official campaigning because of rules that give competing coalitions equal air time.
``I'll be able to rest a bit,'' Berlusconi said, speaking on a talk show late Friday.
He seemed to do no such thing on Saturday, appearing before supporters in the central Italian city of Ancona on the Adriatic Sea and saying, among other things, that ``I fight against communism the way Churchill fought against Nazism,'' according to Italian news agency reports.
He also made fun of his opponent Romano Prodi, telling a joke in which a genie in a lamp tells Prodi it is easier to grant his request for peace in the Middle East than his request for intelligence.
Despite the media blitz, opinion polls have consistently indicated that the center-left bloc headed by Prodi, a former premier and former European Commission president, is leading the race by some five percentage points.
The government's popularity has been sliding amid the country's economic woes and political infighting.
But Berlusconi has expressed confidence that his media campaign will bear fruit, saying his own pollsters indicate the two blocs are virtually tied.
He said on Saturday that a poll done by a ``serious American firm'' that he did not name found that Berlusconi was ahead, according to comments reported by the ANSA and Apcom news agencies.
The election will be a rematch of the 1996 vote, which was won by Prodi.
``We need to change,'' Prodi told supporters on Saturday as he presented the center-left electoral platform in a Rome theater.
The center-left program includes a promise to quickly pull Italy's dwindling contingent out of Iraq in cooperation with Iraqi authorities and to continue working for the reconstruction of the country with a civilian force.
Prodi also vowed to kick-start Italy's economy, promising measures that would enable workers to take home more pay while curbing companies' costs, more investment in research and innovation and focus more on the problems of Italy's chronically underdeveloped south.
The center-left has said that if it wins the election it will seek to reverse many of Berlusconi's reforms.
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