When Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the man widely expected to win Sunday week's Italian general election, went walkabout in central Milan last Saturday afternoon, he inevitably came across hecklers.

The centre-right opposition leader, who among other slogans has penned that of the "Worker President" for himself, had just finished lunch in Milan's fashionable Savini restaurant when 16-year-old Simone Lazzari shouted: "Presidente, my father is a worker, too, but he's never been able to go to Savini's for lunch in all his life."

"It's obvious, then, that your father didn't work as hard as me," answered the politician, undaunted.

Mr Berlusconi (64), the son of a Milan bank clerk and one-time crooner on an ocean-going liner, is nothing if not self-confident. Listed by Forbes magazine as the world's 14thrichest person, he has built his family-controlled Fininvest holding company into a $14 billion conglomerate whose (mainly Italian) interests include Italy's largest three commercial television networks (commanding a 43 per cent audience share and 60 per cent of total television advertising sales), Italy's biggest publishing house (Mondadori), Blockbuster video rentals, the daily newspaper Il Giornale, telephone directories Pagine Italia, Internet company Newmedia, financial services company Mediolanum and football club AC Milan.

Mr Berlusconi's answer to his 16-year-old interlocutor was typical. Throughout his public life, and most recently in his official autobiography (12 million copies of which he has recently posted to Italians at an estimated cost of $20 million), he has portrayed his rise and rise as a paean to the virtues of hard work, innovation and self-made enterprise in a capitalist world. (Incidentally, his autobiography tells us that his favourite authors include Dante, Plato, St Augustine, Meister Eckhart and Erasmus.)

He certainly does work hard, as close collaborators know to their cost - phone calls at 6 a.m. are nothing exceptional. Furthermore, not only those voters preparing to jump on his electoral bandwagon, but also long-time close associates claim he is a charismatic figure, capable of inspiring fierce loyalty.

Mention the name Berlusconi to men such as Fedele Confalonieri, chairman of Mediaset (the company that controls the Berlusconi television networks), or Adriano Galliani, acting president of AC Milan, and their eyes light up with an almost missionary glow.

But not everyone shares their enthusiasm. Critics both inside and outside Italy - and there have been a lot of the latter in the past fortnight - argue that he is "not fit to lead the government of any country, least of all one of the world's richest democracies", as the British weekly The Economist put it last week in an exceptionally outspoken editorial.

That critique, albeit in a different tone and key, is shared not only by Mr Berlusconi's centre-left electoral rivals, but also by some of the most authoritative news organisations in the world, such as the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, El Mundo, Die Zeit, Le Nouvel Observateur and the Financial Times.

Put simply, concern about Mr Berlusconi is focused on three areas. First, where did his original money come from? Second, how can a man who in the past decade has been investigated for money-laundering, Mafia collusion, tax evasion and bribery of politicians, judges and tax inspectors be considered fit for public office? Third, how can a man of such wealth avoid an obvious conflict of interests when in office?

RATHER than offering convincing answers to the above questions (or indeed to the 58 sent to him by The Economist), Mr Berlusconi has consistently portrayed himself as the victim of a political witch-hunt orchestrated by left-wing opponents.

This week he dismissed foreign media criticism as a campaign of "leftist international filth and slander". With regard to his judicial problems, Mr Berlusconi points out correctly that, so far, he has been regularly acquitted - proof of the witch-hunt theory.

Yet four of those "acquittals" - regarding illegal party financing, tax fraud, corruption and false accounting - were gained through either the statute of limitations or an amnesty. Rather than resolve the conflict-of-interests question by selling off his Fininvest empire at any point in the past seven years since his "taking to the pitch" of politics in February 1994, he remains in active, if distant, control of his group.

His oft-repeated claim to be a self-made millionaire does not take account of the fact that, along the way, he cultivated some distinctly influential friends, such as the disgraced Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi, who died a convicted felon in self-imposed exile in Tunisia last year.

Mr Berlusconi's claim to represent something new in Italian politics ignores the fact that his personal and political fortunes were conceived and constructed in the Cold War era, in the bad old days of Christian Democrat-Socialist-dominated Italian politics.

He argues that the conflict of interests is a red herring. He says he is so wealthy - "Only Bill Gates has done better than me on the world scene" - that he has no need of politics to enrich himself. Critics, however, would say that his 1994 overnight-sensation entry into politics was prompted by Fininvest's huge financial problems. These were promptly resolved during his seven-month period of government in 1994, add the critics.

Many Italians, of course, admire his wealth, while supporters regularly point out that he gives employment (often very well paid) to more than 22,000 people. That, too, leads on to perhaps the most intriguing conundrum concerning Silvio Berlusconi, namely his undoubted popularity.

Some years ago, when his TV advertising revenue was threatened, he successfully persuaded Italians to vote in a referendum for longer commercial breaks during films on television, notwithstanding an EU directive to the contrary.

Such is his persuasive charm, his smooth, tanned and smiling manner, not to mention his mastery of television salesmanship, that, if he desired, he could probably persuade Italians to vote for longer traffic jams (good for the soul), the abolition of pasta (bad for the waistline) and the demolition of the Tower of Pisa (it is falling over, anyway).

Italians have heard Mr Berlusconi bitterly attacked before, especially by his centre-left opponents at the last election in 1996. In the meantime, he remains a free and ever-richer man, while they have been sorely penalised by four years of fiscal austerity, necessary for Italy to make the euro. In the meantime, too, the outgoing centre-left government has worked closely with him in its inconclusive Bicamerale, or Constitutional Reforms Commission.

And, as far as many Italians are concerned, there lies the rub. If Mr Berlusconi really was such an ogre back in 1996, and is again now, then why did the centre-left government not do something about him over the past five years? If he really does represent a threat to democracy, why was the centre-left all too happy to sit down and discuss reform of the very foundations of Italian democracy with him?

A majority of the electorate may well answer those questions next Sunday week by voting for Silvio Berlusconi.