The Italian PM, Silvio Berlusconi - 'distinctly scary'. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images
It's as if he were trying to make the final scene of Nanni Moretti's new film come true. Il Caimano (The Cayman) - and no prizes for guessing who is the reptile in left-leaning Moretti's movie - ends with a mob, stirred up by Silvio Berlusconi, attacking the courthouse in Milan where he has just been sentenced to jail, writes John Hooper in Rome.
Absurd, said most critics. Ludicrous, agreed the prime minister's sympathisers.
But, with four days to go before Italy's general election, Mr Berlusconi seems to be doing everything in his power to raise the temperature and bring society to the boil - not, as in the film, by inciting the right, but by provoking and outraging the left. In a country which is no stranger to political violence, that is playing with fire.
Yesterday, Mr Berlusconi said anyone who voted against him and his promise of tax cuts would be a "dickhead". Today, he did something far more dangerous when he mounted an attempt simply to ignore the rules on equal media coverage.
He announced he would be appearing on a programme on one of his own channels tonight without anyone from the opposition to contradict him. What - if anything - he intended to announce is still not known, but one must presume he wanted the airtime for a reason.
Mr Berlusconi claimed he had been given the green light for this grotesque manoeuvre by Italy's communications authority. But the watchdog said such an authorisation had "not even been requested". Its commissioners then announced they had called an emergency meeting to discuss "the urgent adoption of measures, including those of a preventative nature".
It was only at that point, by which time the centre-left's politicians were apoplectic with rage, that Mr Berlusconi climbed down. Mr Prodi called the episode "very serious". The centre-left senator Luigi Zanda went further when he described it as "clearly subversive".
It was an attempt, not just to undermine his opponents, but to undermine the very framework of the election itself.
The problem with media concentration on Mr Berlusconi's "gaffes", like his "dickhead" remark, is that it makes him seem like a clown. But, just as his "gaffes" are actually scrupulously calculated to produce a specific, desired effect, so Mr Berlusconi is no clown.
He is very shrewd - and, at times like this, distinctly scary.
