http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11836958/
Prodi's wins debate with Berlusconi
By Tony Barber in Rome
Updated: 7:11 a.m. ET March 15, 2006
Romano Prodi, Italy's centre-left opposition leader, appeared to enhance his chances of winning next month's national election after political analysts and snap opinion polls declared him the winner of Tuesday night's televised debate with Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister.
According to three polls of TV viewers taken immediately after the 90-minute debate, Mr Prodi got the better of Mr Berlusconi, who at times appeared unusually flustered, and who often exceeded his time limit for answering questions.
Little more than three weeks before the April 9-10 election, Mr Prodi and the opposition are leading the centre-right government in most opinion polls by roughly 3 to 5 percentage points, enough to secure majorities in both houses of parliament.
Mr Prodi scored some telling points during the debate, particularly when he mocked Mr Berlusconi for spending five years as prime minister and concentrating mostly on legislation to favour his business interests and extract him from his tangles with Italy's judicial system.
"After five years in government, you're talking as if you've been in opposition all that time. With a 120-seat parliamentary majority, how is it possible that you have only approved laws that concern yourself?" Mr Prodi asked.
Mr Berlusconi directed his fire at the centre-left's record in government from 1996 to 2001 and, in particular, played on Italians' perception that inflation is high by blaming Mr Prodi for introducing the euro in place of the lira too hastily.
But Mr Berlusconi made rather less of his own proposals for the next five years and, in his concluding statement, said: "It seems to me that we have not succeeded, at least as far as I am concerned, in giving Italians what they wanted to know."
By contrast, a beaming Mr Prodi said: "I'll just say that I'm very happy."
Mr Berlusconi, a billionaire media magnate, is generally considered a master of the medium of television, but he has now put in two less than convincing performances in three days.
Last Sunday he was goaded in a TV interview, conducted by a well-known leftwing Italian journalist, into an argument in which both he and the interviewer talked simultaneously at each other and Mr Berlusconi eventually stormed out of the studio.
The second Berlusconi-Prodi TV debate is scheduled for April 3.