NEXT STEP : ITALY / TURNING POINT : Disgusted with corruption, voters look right and left for a political rebirth.

Maria Luisa Boccia, a rookie political candidate puzzling out campaign tactics in a smoky basement headquarters, symbolizes her expectant and perplexed country. Boccia knows where she wants to go, but isn’t sure how to get there.

Italy heads this weekend into national elections marked by scandal, uncertainty and unlikely alliances, all punctuated by tumult enough for a temperamental diva.

But none of the tempest should obscure the significance of the balloting Sunday and Monday: the election marks a traumatic, ground-breaking search for political rebirth in a rich but leaderless country disgusted with its corrupt democracy.

A radically re-textured political fabric has divided into forces of the left, center and right, all gathering for a high-stakes leap into an unclear future.

Reformers once portrayed the election as a preface to a more open and honest “Second Republic,” a renewed democracy with overhauled and modernized structures of government.

Now, it seems unlikely that the voting will produce either a clear-cut winner or the decisive, new-look rule that most Italians say they seek. Nonetheless, it will be pivotal.

“People are fed up; the political system has collapsed. If we can’t restore legality and legitimacy to government, democracy itself is at risk,” said Boccia, the first-time candidate who is running under the banner of a left-wing alliance.

A philosophy professor, Boccia, 48, is one of hundreds of newcomers vying for parliamentary seats in the two days of voting. They range from left-wing academics to technocrat engineers, doctors, businessmen and journalists. And they all promise a moral reawakening as the foundation for modern, post-ideological government in Italy.

Chief among the debuting candidates is self-professed anti-Communist crusader Silvio Berlusconi, one of the country’s richest men and--suddenly--Italy’s most popular politician.

He portrays himself as the one figure who could short-circuit chances of a leftist victory. The collapse of international communism had made Italy’s left less threatening, and the subsequent decimation by scandal of its domestic opponents had elevated it to the position of clear election favorite until Berlusconi jumped into the race.

Five former prime ministers, several Cabinet ministers and numerous parliamentarians, along with some of the country’s most prominent industrialists, have been scarred by a two-year investigation that has documented official corruption. More than 3,000 in all have been touched by the probe, which has uncovered millions of dollars of theft and illegal payments to politicians of virtually every party in every part of the country. The scandal has provoked national soul-searching and personal tragedy. Well-known Italian officials and business leaders were among almost a dozen who took their lives after being implicated in the scandal.

“Everyone knew, everyone is guilty,” former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, himself under investigation, told a magistrate in Milan who inquired how deeply ran the rot.

Known to Italians as Tangentopoli, or “Kickback City,” the expanding scandal centers on years of payoffs for public contracts, most of them made to political parties.

The Christian Democrats, so long esteemed by Italians, Washington and the Vatican alike as a bulwark against communism, stand foremost among the major parties painted with ignominy by judicial inquiry. Their principal allies in an unbroken skein of political power that has lasted nearly half a century also have been shamed, including Craxi’s Socialist Party.

Now, seeking a break with the past, Italy has fashioned a new electoral system, scrapping proportional, vote-for-parties rules that have produced 52 weak, look-alike coalition governments since World War II, all of them forged in smoke-filled rooms far from public gaze.

Under the reforms, Italians will vote for individual candidates for the first time.

Three-quarters of 630 deputies and 315 senators will be elected in the winner-take-all, American style. Probably for the last time, the remaining seats will be distributed proportionally, allowing continued representation by sliver parties.

Also for the first time, candidates are campaigning, all’Americana , in factories, supermarkets, schools and neighborhood coffee bars to sell themselves and their programs.

“When I try to meet people outside a post office or a hospital, there is a great curiosity about who I am and what I think,” said Boccia, a member of the renamed Italian Communist Party who is running against a centrist and a rightist in the working class San Giovanni district of Rome.

National issues preoccupying Italian voters parallel those in the rest of Europe: recession, employment and job security, social service, taxes, privatization, government debt and bureaucratic inefficiency.

Italy’s overriding down-home concern, though, is the quest for moral authority. With institutional credibility hostage to scandal, voters tell pollsters that they are perplexed and mistrusting.

“The children of Tangentopoli are confused, lost. They need security and don’t know where to find it,” said the Rome newspaper La Repubblica in an analysis of a recent opinion poll. “They want a candidate who is innovative, but mature; who has experience but is honest.”

Enter Silvio Berlusconi.

At 57, he is a self-made industrialist, billionaire and media baron whose holdings range from advertising agencies and magazines to the country’s three largest private television networks, to red-and-black Milan, which is Italy’s, and perhaps the world’s, most famous professional soccer team.

In a delicious play on words in a country where cardinals are referred to as “Sua Eminenza,” (Your Eminence,) Italian newspapers call Berlusconi “Sua Emittenza,” (Your Broadcastship.)

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Surveying the Italian political universe late last year from his entrepreneur’s perch in Milan, Berlusconi did not like what he saw. With Christian Democrats under Mino Martinazzoli in disarray and about to split, the center was shrinking.

Reformer Mario Segni, who was responsible for the electoral reform, seemed slow and weak in forming a centrist movement called Pact for Italy (Patto Per L’Italia) as focus for a new center--the traditional home for 30% to 40% of Italian voters, most of them conservative Catholics.

In the absence of a strong center, Berlusconi concluded, the most likely winner of the election would be the left, led by the former Communist Party, long Italy’s second-largest political movement and since 1991 called the Party of the Democratic Left, PDS for its acronym in Italian.

Under bland, self-effacing party leader Achille Occhetto, the former Communists have persuaded most Italians that they are just that: their pro-U.S., pro-NATO, pro-Europe policies are social democratic, and their pro-privatization economics conservative enough to draw applause for Occhetto on a recent visit to The City, London’s financial district.

“We want to hold together efficiency and solidarity,” he said there, proposing lower taxes for families and businesses and more productive government investments. His party’s platform calls for “a government of reconstruction” to continue privatization and the reduction of Italy’s huge public debt, a campaign now directed by Prime Minister Carlo Ciampi.

Edging pointedly toward the center, Occhetto said he would even support another prime ministerial term for Ciampi, an apolitical technocrat and widely respected former central bank president.

Washington, which laid on all sail to help keep Communists out of Italian governments during the Cold War, has given clear signals that it would view a lefist PDS-led government without alarm this time around.

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Berlusconi is not sure, arguing that any government led by former Communists would be “an intolerant regime” poisonous for business. Even with a new name, the former Communists have “a mentality and a way of acting that is still pure Stalinist, pure dictatorship,” said the billionaire businessman, whom admirers sometimes compare to Ross Perot.

“I do not want to live in an illiberal country governed by immature forces and men closely tied to a politically and economically bankrupt past,” Berlusconi said in January, announcing that he would personally lead his new right-wing movement, which is called Forza Italia (Go, Italy), a rallying cry of Italian sports fans.

At the head of 267 Forza Italia candidates across the country--all of them, like their party leader, seeking national office for the first time--Berlusconi is running for a parliamentary seat from central Rome.

When a ban on further publication of poll results went into effect 10 days ago, Forza Italia, the newest national political movement, was also its most popular. The last sounding gave the right 43% (26% for Forza Italia); the left 38% (20% for the former Communists), and the center, dominated by the Christian Democrats, now called the Italian Peoples’ Party, the remaining 19%.

In search of a parliamentary majority of the right, Berlusconi has acquired two electoral allies: Umberto Bossi, the bumptious head of the populist-federalist Northern League (7%) and Gianfranco Fini, polished boss of Italian neo-fascists newly renamed the National Alliance (10%).

The rightist parties have agreed on common candidates in most districts. But candidates are answerable to their own parties, and the prospect of effective governmental collaboration among the three movements is dim.

Bossi, who threatens secession of the rich north, will have nothing to do with Fini, whose support is strongest in the south. Bossi also rails publicly against Berlusconi for his ties to the old order and to his friend Craxi. Berlusconi has been personally untouched by Tangentopoli, but his younger brother Paolo and five managers of his Fininvest financial empire are under judicial scrutiny.

For their part, the former Communists have forged an eight-party Progressive Alliance that includes Greens, an anti-Mafia party, leftist Catholics and--embarrass ingly--a hard-line splinter of the old Communist Party backed by about one voter in 20. Called Refounded Communism, it is still loudly Marxist in its rhetoric and program--and profoundly discomfiting to would-be statesman Occhetto, who dreams of a place in government for his party after almost 50 years in opposition.

Confronted with a confusing new political constellation, many voters will not make up their minds until the last minute, but judging from the last polls Italians will see before they vote, neither left nor right will emerge with a parliamentary majority.

That might give a key broker’s role to the reduced center, itself certain to be pushed from the driver’s seat for the first time since World War II.

Post-electoral jockeying could produce a left-center coalition, a right-center coalition, or perhaps a government of “national unity” to continue economic reforms that are common goals of all three alliances.

Almost nobody expects Italy to emerge with a definitive “Second Republic” in its first experience with new faces and rules.

Rather, this bellwether election is apt to mark the beginning of what could be a long and perhaps unsettling transition toward a simpler, more transparent and ultimately more respected political system for Italy.

Many Contenders

Here are the major parties in Italy’s elections:

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RIGHT

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Gianfranco Fini

Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance)

Renamed neo-fascist Italian Social Movement remains glued to the right but offers a more open face and moderated policies, hoping to mute a fascist past.

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Umberto Bossi

Lega Nord (Northern League)

Young, ambitious populist-federalist movement aims to capitalize on northern Italians’ disgust with southern corruption and Rome’s bureaucracy.

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Silvio Berlusconi

Forza Italia (Go Italy)

New creation of virulently anti-leftist media czar preaches unfettered free-market capitalism in an uneasy alliance with Fini and Bossi.

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CENTER

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Mino Martinazzoli

Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Peoples’ Party)

Newly named, avowedly reformed bulk of Christian Democrats, the party that dominated postwar governments but has lost its grip due to scandal.

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Mario Segni

Patto Per L’Italia (Pact for Italy)

New party founded by renegade Christian Democrats behind a personally bland reformer responsible for electoral reform.

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LEFT

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Achille Occhetto

Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left)

Renamed Italian Communist party is the largest survivor among old-line parties. As senior partner of an eight-party Progressive Alliance, it is officially social democratic and frightens few beside Berlusconi.

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Fausto Bertinotti

Rifondazione Communista (Communist Refoundation)

Small Marxist group that broke from the mainline Communist Party when it changed its name.

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Various leaders

Alleanza Democratica (Democratic Alliance)

A collection of small center-left parties and a few renegades from scarred major parties.

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Ottaviano del Turco

Partito Socialista Italiana (Italian Socialist Party)

Shreds of the once-burgeoning star of center-left and a major government player under former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, now among political leaders named in corruption inquiries.

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Leoluca Orlando

La Rete (The Network)

Anti-Mafia party led by mayor of Palermo is now also growing among voters in the Italian north.

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Carlo Ripa di Meana

Verdi (Greens)

Movement led by former European environment commissioner has recently won mayoralty of Rome.

Source: Times staff.