Italians admire our voting style

Ask Italians about the British general election and they will tell you with a world-weary sigh that they've seen it all before. "It's going to be a photocopy of what happened to us a year ago," one friend opined. "You've got a left-wing party that's poised to take power for the first time in donkey's years, but it has made so many compromises to reach the threshold of power that it isn't particularly left-wing any more."

The parallels, it is true, are striking. Tony Blair has cast a careful eye over the fortunes of the Italian PDS, the Democratic Party of the Left, which won its first election since the Second World War last April and has governed ever since at the head of a centre-left coalition. The PDS, in turn, has drawn much of its inspiration from Mr Blair, making gargantuan efforts to live down its past as standard-bearer of the western European Communist movement and bending over backwards to understand and accommodate the views of its (now defunct) historic rivals, the Christian Democrats.

For the average PDS supporter, or indeed most other Italian voters, the results have been less than striking. Most of the left-wingers who popped champagne corks on 21 April last year feel that the bubbles have gone distinctly flat. The PDS is enmeshed in the sort of coalition politics that Italy had hoped to consign firmly to the past, and all talk of social or political revolution has ceased.

Most Italians foresee a similar fate for New Labour. Mr Blair may be selling himself as a more competent manager than the Conservatives, but he isn't making enormous efforts to accentuate policy differences. As he told La Repubblica in an interview last week: "Ideological considerations have disappeared. Ours has become a modern party competent to govern."

The language is reminiscent of a man who fancies himself as Italy's answer to Mr Blair, the Deputy Prime Minister, Walter Veltroni. Mr Veltroni is young, moderate and telegenic. He has ambitions to dissolve the PDS altogether and form a new centre-left party along the lines of New Labour or the Democrats in the United States. Mr Veltroni even popped in on the Labour Party conference last autumn to pick up a few ideas for his project.

The problem is that, in Italy at least, ideology is still too important for most people to take Mr Veltroni seriously. The lack of real ideological conflict in the British election has had a similarly uninspiring effect on Italian newspaper readers, most of whom would be hard put to remember that Britain is going to the polls.

The truth is, British politics is a bit of a turn-off these days. Royal scandals, yes. Tales of toe-sucking Cabinet ministers and secret trysts with 17-year-old nightclub waitresses, definitely. But the endless sparring between Messrs Blair and Major over education and the NHS? Forget it: the Italians have other things to think about, such as the festering crisis on their doorstep in Albania.

Of course, there is one thing about British politics that makes Italians green with envy, and that is the electoral system. Two main parties and first-past-the-post constituency voting: it sounds like heaven to Italian psephologists, exasperated by half a century of revolving-door governments and endless inter-party bickering. Whenever British politicians start advocating proportional representation, most Italians think they must be completely barmy.