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Italy blocs make final

push in cliffhanger vote

ROME: Italy's election campaign culminates on Friday when centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi rallies his troops and makes a last pitch to win over undecided voters.

The media mogul and his Freedom Alliance allies are set to gather in the elegant Piazza Navona on Friday evening for their final rally in Rome at the end of a mud-slinging campaign.

He and his main partner, far-right leader Gianfranco Fini, are then due to make a dash to Milan to wind up their campaign.

With opinion polls banned, political commentators say Sunday's general election, the third in four years of constant chaos, is too close to call and reckon many Italians are still wondering which way to vote, or whether to vote at all.

Berlusconi's main rival, the centre-left Olive Tree bloc, ended its own campaign on Thursday.

Flashing "V" for victory signs, the bloc's leaders cheekily called a rally on "enemy territory" -- the Piazza del Popolo square where Berlusconi feted his victory at the last election in 1994 just 10 weeks after bursting into politics.

"We can do it," Olive Tree deputy leader Walter Veltroni told thousands of cheering supporters. "We're betting on Italy and its future."

Berlusconi and Romano Prodi, the mild-mannered Catholic economics professor who leads the Olive Tree, face off in one last television debate on Friday at the end of a campaign paved with insults and acrimony.

Berlusconi, fanning lingering fears of communism, says a vote for the Olive Tree would spell the end of democracy.

Prodi in turn has held up Berlusconi's track record -- seven stormy months in government -- to ridicule.

He says Roman Catholic voters wondering whom to back after the collapse of the Christian Democrat party in Italy's graft storms should not trust a man who made his money in a media empire that he accused of peddling pictures of sex and violence to the masses.

The Olive Tree, which groups the ex-communist Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), centrists from Christian Democrat ruins and the Greens, portrays itself as the only side able to give Italy stability and a future in Europe.

"The Olive Tree knows how to listen to people who last time let themselves be seduced by Berlusconi's promises and this time want to trust in a more secure option," PDS leader Massimo D'Alema told flag-waving supporters at the rally.

"They said if we win there won't be elections," he added. "For five years there won't be elections because we want to govern this country which the right hasn't been able to do."-Reuter