Walter Veltroni - Italy's Barack Obama

Walter Veltroni &  Barack ObamaRome - Walter Veltroni has the cheek, his more lenient critics would say, of portraying himself as a fresh-faced politician poised to lead Italy into a new, prosperous era, when in fact he was first elected to public office more than 30 years ago.

The 52-year-old former Rome mayor has remained undaunted by this or much harsher accusations related to his Communist past.

Echoing US presidential hopeful Barack Obama - for whose book The Audacity of Hope he also wrote a preface to the Italian edition - Veltroni has made breaking with recent history the thrust of his campaign to become prime minister.

"Italians are tired of hearing the same things for the past 14 years," is Veltroni's oft-repeated remark during a countrywide bus tour in which the centre-left Democratic Party leader has tried to canvass support ahead of the April 13-14 elections.

The "14 years" reference is not casual.

In 1994, billionaire businessman Silvio Berlusconi burst onto the political scene, with a new party and winning elections on a ticket that promised to defend Italy's dynamic small-and-medium enterprises from the stifling control of "communists" and the state bureaucracy.

With Berlusconi now a 71-year-old, three-times former prime minister again running on a similar centre-right platform, Veltroni is trying to persuade Italians to reject his main rival's rhetoric and choose a younger, more able leader.

Veltroni's novelty factor may be suspect but unlike Obama, the US presidential candidate he so admires, he can draw on an extensive political track record.

Born in Rome to a RAI state broadcaster official and a mother of Slovenian origin, Veltroni joined the Communist Party in his teens and was 21 when he was elected a city councillor.

He first won a seat in parliament in 1987 and was instrumental in the party's jettisoning of its Marxist ideology and its name in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse.

Veltroni first honed his skills as a communicator - an attribute media tycoon Berlusconi has grudgingly acknowledged - in the 1990s during a stint as editor of the former Communist, by then renamed Democratic Party of the Left's newspaper, L'Unita.

But much of Veltroni's political reputation - for some a testament of his administrative abilities, for others a triumph of image over substance - rests on his tenure as mayor of Rome, which began in 2001.

Although critics point to growing crime, traffic and pollution problems during his first term, Veltroni also received widespread praise for the town hall's handling of the hundred of thousands of people who streamed into the city for Pope John Paul II's funeral in 2005.

Re-elected the following year with an increase of votes from 53 per cent to 61 per cent, cinema buff Veltroni raised the capital's profile by launching a well-received international annual film festival.

He resigned as mayor to concentrate on the national stage following a October 2007 landslide victory in the leadership primaries for the newly formed Democratic Party, a merger of former Communists and moderate Catholics.

After the collapse of Romano Prodi's government in February, Veltroni took the bold decision not to run in coalition with the small extreme left parties in the April elections, but to run solo on a reformist platform instead.

Married to Flavia with whom he has two daughters, Veltroni has written several books, including Perhaps God is Sick, chronicling a visit to Africa, a continent where he says he would like to move to and do humanitarian work once he retires from politics. (dpa)

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