That's pretty much all you need to know to feel very worried that Berlusconi's challenger might not win in the Italian elections:
Exit polls indicated Monday that the Italian parliamentary election pitting center-left economist Romano Prodi against flamboyant billionaire Premier Silvio Berlusconi was too close to call. Projections showed Berlusconi's coalition leading in the Senate, but the two sides running neck-and-neck in the lower Chamber of Deputies.
Berlusconi has made democracy something quite different in Italy. Sound familiar? That he might not lose is disheartening and raises all sorts of questions about this era as the End of the Experiment in Democracy and so on. I still hope he might lose, though.