By the time you read this we may be in the midst of an election campaign, caused by prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s expulsion of former ally Gianfranco Fini from the ranks of the PdL (People of Freedom) party in July.

Fini, a canny political animal, founded Alleanza Nazionale in 1994 out of the more centrist elements of Italy’s former neo-Fascist right, and steered it into an election-winning alliance with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and Umberto Bossi’s regionalist Northern League. In the process, he effected a remarkable makeover, from apologist of Fascism to voice of democratic reason, supporter of same-sex civil unions and defender of the rule of law in an alliance where moderation and respect for the democratic process were sometimes in short supply. When Fini was elected Speaker of Italy’s Camera dei Deputati (parliament’s lower house) in April 2008, he was one of the few figures who genuinely commanded cross-party respect.

The problem was that by this time Fini’s own party had disappeared. Berlusconi, who for all his gaffes and comic lothario posturings, is a wily politician, had cajoled Fini into merging Alleanza Nazionale with Forza Italia under the banner Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL). Perhaps Fini’s head had been turned when Berlusconi named him as his political heir in January 2007.

The merger was Fini’s one big political blunder so far. Given Berlusconi’s increasingly brazen use of parliament to favour his business empire and protect himself from judicial prosecution, and Fini’s increasingly solemn ethical stance, a split was inevitable. When it finally came – with Berlusconi’s one-time successor keeping the moral high ground by getting sacked rather than resigning – Fini set up a new parliamentary group, Futuro e Libertà, with 34 lower-house MPs and 10 senators.

Polls indicated that while only around 5% of Italians would be prepared to vote for this new bloc (still not an official party), it would still be enough to topple Berlusconi, now 74 and looking and sounding increasingly tired and strident.

The post-Berlusconi manoeuvrings have begun and many Italians are now contemplating a scenario even stranger than the UK’s Con-Lib coalition: a centre-left governing alliance bookended by a party whose guiding light was still singing the praises of Mussolini as recently as 1994, and another, the Partito Democratico, whose leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, rose through the Communist Party. Such are the paradoxes of Italian politics.