March 12 (Bloomberg) -- An Italian pop song called ``I Trust You'' played as Walter Veltroni took the stage in the city of Foggia and boasted how he was ``running alone'' in his effort to defeat Silvio Berlusconi and become Italy's prime minister.

``Italy is ready for a new start,'' the former Rome mayor said last month on the eighth of 110 bus-tour stops before the April 13-14 elections.

Veltroni is the first Italian party leader in 14 years to forgo running as part of a broader coalition, instead campaigning only as the representative of his Democratic Party. Italian coalitions, which are sometimes made up of as many as a dozen parties, make it difficult for the winner to govern because they group together politicians of widely differing views and agendas.

Win or lose, Veltroni's decision will alter Italian politics, said Franco Pavoncello, a professor of politics and president of Rome's John Cabot University. ``Veltroni's decision to run alone is the most important novelty introduced in the Italian political system in many years,'' he said.

Prime Minister Romano Prodi's 10-party coalition government, the 61st since World War II, collapsed in January after the Udeur party -- with just three Senate votes --withdrew its support. For this campaign, Veltroni has dumped the Udeur, the Socialists, the Greens, two communist parties and other even smaller blocs.

Trailing Berlusconi

The latest polls show Veltroni, 52, trailing Berlusconi, the 71-year-old media billionaire who has already twice served as prime minister. Berlusconi and his allies would win between 42.5 percent and 43 percent of the vote compared with 38 to 38.5 percent for Veltroni's party, according to an SWG Srl poll of 1,200 potential voters conducted on March 10-11 with a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Even Berlusconi, following Veltroni's decision, has modified his strategy, reducing the number of parties in his coalition and creating the People of Liberty party from a merger of his Forza Italia party and the National Alliance.

``The country got stuck because the political system was stuck,'' Veltroni said in Barletta, Italy, last month to a crowd of about 400 people at a 13th-century castle. ``For the past 15 years the question has been who will win or lose the vote. Now the question is: Who will change the country?''

The candidates' decision to shun coalitions will probably lead to two dominant parties for the first time since World War II, said Roberto D'Alimonte, a professor of politics at the University of Florence.

Echoing Obama

Veltroni rides into the towns he visits aboard a green Fiat SpA bus covered with campaign slogans. He's usually greeted in the main town square by hundreds of supporters chanting ``Walter, Walter!'' or his campaign slogan ``Si Puo Fare!'' -- the Italian translation of ``Yes We Can!'' It was chosen explicitly to mimic the slogan of Barack Obama, the Illinois senator who is running for the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination.

``It's important that Veltroni has freed himself from the chains of the coalition,'' Paolo Montatore a 49-year-old marshal in the air force, said at the Barletta rally. ``He gives us hope for change.''

Veltroni's roots are in Italy's Communist Party, whose youth federation he joined in 1970, at the age of 15. He was one of the leaders who steered the party away from Marxism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

White Night

Married with two daughters, he served under Prodi as deputy prime minister for from 1996 to 1998, and was first elected mayor of his hometown in 2001. As mayor, he instituted a popular, all-night party called the ``White Night,'' which drew some 2.5 million people last year.

While Berlusconi created the People of Liberty party and disposed of one ally -- the Union of Christian Democrats --he's still running with three other coalition partners.

``Veltroni is trying to sell the left as new and innovative,'' Berlusconi said on Feb. 29 in Rome, when he presented his campaign platform. ``The disaster this country finds itself in today was inherited from Prodi,'' who governed for the past two years.

The Democratic Party ``needs to stage the biggest comeback in Italian history,'' Veltroni said in Tuscany on March 3. In Modena, Veltroni spoke to a crowd of 5,000 gathered after a spaghetti dinner. He cited Martin Luther King Jr. and Obama as examples of leaders who stand for change and national unity.

``When we both started out, no one would have bet a dollar or a euro on me or Obama,'' he said on the press bus between Cesena and Rimini on Feb. 23.

Veltroni met Obama on a trip to the U.S. in 2005 and wrote the preface to the Italian translation of Obama's autobiography, ``The Audacity of Hope.''

The former mayor's invocation of American political themes and figures is consistent with his effort to remake the Italian model, D'Alimonte said.

``Veltroni is using techniques straight out of American politics to try to break down the barrier that divides the right and the left in Italy,'' D'Alimonte said. ``He's chipping away at the wall.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Steve Scherer in Rome at scherer@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: March 12, 2008 09:13 EDT