Italy’s regional elections. In the voting season

What the scandal and intrigue over this weekend's elections say about Italy

FOR some years now, new brooms have been heard rustling across southern Europe. In Spain, politics became visibly less corrupt under José Maria Aznar. In Greece, Costas Karamanlis has launched a campaign to curb graft. The exception, however, is Italy.

A high-profile anti-corruption drive in the 1990s destroyed the crooked party-financing methods that underpinned the old, Christian Democrat-dominated system. But its long-term effect was to hand power to Silvio Berlusconi, who has several times managed to escape conviction by virtue of Italy's statute of limitations. In any case, the activities of a handful of Milan magistrates has had little lasting impact on a society held together by a network of reciprocal favours, in which respect for the rule of law is weak.

This is being brought home again by the campaign for the regional elections that are being held on April 3rd and 4th. The campaign has shown up not only alarming indifference to the law on both sides of the political divide, but also a system of justice that almost invites disdain - vitiated by unworkable legislation, legalistic humbug and a blurred separation between the judiciary and the executive.

Voters will elect governments in 14 of Italy's 20 regions, in the last big test of public opinion before a general election due next spring. The result will affect the overall mood of both the centre-right government and the centre-left opposition as they gear up for the national poll. The biggest battleground is Lazio, the region that encompasses Rome. The governor, Francesco Storace of the formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, faces challenges on two fronts: from a centre-left candidate, and from Alessandra Mussolini, grand-daughter of Italy's Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Ms Mussolini stormed out of the National Alliance in 2003 after its leader, Gianfranco Fini, had disavowed fascism on a visit to Israel. She later formed a party, Social Alternative, which the polls suggest could win as much as 9% of the vote, possibly tipping the balance against Mr Storace. But on March 12th Social Alternative was barred from standing. To cut back the number of small parties, the law requires them to present large numbers of endorsements. Electoral officials announced that hundreds of Social Alternative's endorsements were blatantly faked. One came from a sponsor who was apparently born on a February 31st.

Ms Mussolini denied the forgeries. But, contradictorily, she added that everybody did it and that she was the victim of a plot. Evidence has since emerged to suggest that she is right on both counts. The justice minister, Roberto Castelli, has admitted that the forging of endorsements has been “going on for years”. But he has also said that the law is impractical, as it does not give the parties enough time to gather signatures. As for alleged conspiracy, it has transpired that employees of a firm answering to Mr Storace's regional government hacked into the civil registry to check details of Social Alternative's sponsors.

Opposition leaders expressed outrage, but were noticeably less scandalised by Social Alternative's original alleged ruse. In some regions, though not in Lazio, even left-wing elected representatives were found to have signed Social Alternative's endorsements. Ms Mussolini herself went on hunger strike outside a court to which she had appealed, but the judges still upheld the ban. She then left her mobile home for a meal of salad and lasagne, and announced a further appeal. The same day the cabinet gave the judge in charge of the court that ruled against Ms Mussolini a top job as head of Italy's media watchdog. Both the judge and the government stoutly deny that there is any link between these two events.

As it happens, the court's judgment was later nullified because, on March 22nd, Ms Mussolini secured an entirely different ruling from Italy's supreme administrative court. The court decided that the real issue was not whether the endorsements were fakes, but whether they were properly authenticated by the appropriate official. It later came out that two of the five judges who ruled in Ms Mussolini's favour had held senior positions in a previous, centre-left government. Again, there is no suggestion that they were influenced by their political affiliations. But the affair shows up the fragile credibility of a judiciary whose members can float easily from court to government and back again.

Ms Mussolini is pressing ahead with a campaign that may yet have potentially far-reaching effects. A former B-movie starlet with improbably pneumatic lips and blonde hair, the Duce's grand-daughter is a formidable communicator whose cause has now been boosted by a massive dose of publicity. Mr Berlusconi had hoped that, once she had let off steam in Lazio, Ms Mussolini could be wooed into his broad alliance in time for next year's general election. That looks unlikely now.

Her campaign of revenge has infuriated former associates on the right and made her an unlikely darling of the left. Italy's opposition is desperate to oust Mr Berlusconi, not least because it fears that he is systematically neutralising rival sources of power and could become, in effect, impossible to remove. He directly or indirectly controls six of the seven main television channels. He is curbing the freedom of prosecutors. Last week, the Senate approved a constitutional reform that would enhance the powers of the prime minister, weaken those of the president and undermine the independence of the constitutional court - though the reform will need to be endorsed by a referendum.

Italy's opposition leaders, mostly professionals or academics, must envy Ms Mussolini the populist skills they so manifestly lack. In a televised debate with Mr Storace this week, she overwhelmed the governor, who was opining about the family, by repeatedly asking him the price of nappies. Yet in the long run Ms Mussolini could do her new-found friends more harm than good, by luring them into a betrayal of their principles. Ever since the second world war, the most sacred of these has been anti-fascism. Italy's socialists and progressive Catholics, its environmentalists and its former communists, all need to think hard about whether they really want the help of a woman whose supporters in Milan greeted her earlier this year with loud chants of “Duce, Duce”.