Profiles

Profile: Romano Prodi

At age 66, and a former national prime minister and one-time president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi hardly represents the future generation of Italian politics. 

However, Prodi, a former economics professor and candidate for the center-left, hopes his experience and understated manner will bring to an end the five-year government of Silvio Berlusconi.

Where his opponent revels in the glitz and glamour of the media spotlight, Prodi has campaigned on a more serious platform, highlighting issues such as unemployment, crime, the economy and the war in Iraq - from where he has promised to withdraw Italian troops as soon as possible.

One of his campaign posters rather drearily urges Italians to vote Prodi "for seriousness in government".

Despite enjoying a lead of between 3.5 and five percentage points into the last week of campaigning, he has typically steered clear of predicting victory, saying only that it was  "possible", not probable.

Clean-up campaign

Prodi strives to appear as the cerebral candidate, keen to play up the differences with Berlusconi.

"There is no correlation between being a good manager and a good  politician. A good manager acts for his own interests, while a politician acts for everyone," he said during the campaign.

Prodi has based his campaign on  cleaning up the public finances and promises of a return to morals in politics, a thinly veiled dig at Berlusconi's repeated court cases over his business activities.

He has attracted praise for pulling together more than a half-dozen parties in his disparate centre-left coalition, which encompasses interests as diverse as communists and moderate Catholics.

Born in Bologna in 1939, he studied at the London School of  Economics and Milan's Catholic University before joining the faculty of the University of Bologna.

Election winner

Prodi began his political career as industry minister in the  government of Giulio Andreotti in 1978-79.

From 1982 to 1989 he was head of the state holding company IRI,  which he helped privatise, before returning to full-time politics.

When he helped form the Olive Tree centre-left coalition to  contest the April 1996 election, he was initially seen as a  technocrat lacking charisma and uncomfortable on television, but he  won voters round and beat the incumbent Berlusconi.

His premiership only lasted 18 months before his communist coalition partners pulled out, but in that time he revived the ailing Italian economy sufficiently for it to join the single currency three years  later.

During this time Prodi carved out an international  reputation which belied his mild-mannered image and in September 1999 he became the tenth president of the European Commission serving until October 2004.

For a country that prides itself on being one of the six founder EU states, a failure to make it into the euro would have been a  national disaster.

That Prodi was able to avert this was partly due to his ability  to distance himself from Italy's political and media circus, instead channelling all his energies into modernisation and constitutional  reform.

A family man with a wife and two grown children, Prodi enjoys  cycling and distance running, and ran his first marathon in  December.