MILAN: Media mogul Silvio Berlusconi launched his campaign to become Italy's prime minister with his trademark flamboyance today, attacking rivals as Marxists who overtaxed Italians and were lax on illegal immigration. Opinion polls suggest Italy s richest man will return to the prime minister's office for a third time after elections in mid-April that were called following the collapse of Romano Prodi s centre-left government last month.

Out of the public eye in recent days because of the death of his mother, Berlusconi returned to the stage at a meeting of his party s grassroots Freedom Club network to applause and background music belting out Luckily, there is Silvio . He accused caretaker Prime Minister Prodi s outgoing centre-left government of having failed in every area, from taxing them at home to damaging the nation's image abroad because of a garbage crisis in the Naples area.

They have imposed their belief: orthodox Marxism, he said. They have used taxes to hit the middle class. All their measures are conditioned by ideology, like opening the borders to foreigners. Berlusconi has called on centre-right parties to run under a single banner for the elections, just months after squabbling and abruptly parting ways with his allies last year.

The right-wing National Alliance has agreed and the Northern League will join the People of Freedom banner in the south, running under its own symbol in its home base in the north. Another centre-right party, the Union of Christian Democrats, earlier said it was not interested in joining the single list but leader Pierferdinando Casini softened his tone todday and said he was open to talks.

Berlusconi's main challenge in the April election comes from Rome s mayor Walter Veltroni, who also plans to run a solo campaign as head of the centre-left Democratic Party he founded last year with Prodi. Extreme-left and small leftist parties that were part of Prodi s bickering coalition will run separately. One of the ministers in Prodi's outgoing government, Emma Bonino, told La Repubblica newspaper on Saturday that she might run for the prime minister's job herself.

Source : UNI