Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said today he was confident Italians would give him another term in office to complete his reform programme despite opinion polls showing him trailing the opposition centre-left.
With just over three months to go before the vote, opinion polls say Berlusconi's centre-right coalition is at least seven percentage points behind the opposition.
But the prime minister told a small group of foreign reporters that he was confident of closing the gap when he hits the campaign trail in the New Year.
"I cannot believe Italians would be so inattentive or superficial as to punish those who have worked so hard for them over the past five years," he said, brimming with optimism.
"We are in an excellent position to win a big enough majority to govern for another five years," he added.
The ruling centre-right coalition won a landslide majority in 2001, but its popularity has steadily declined as the economy faltered and ordinary Italians began to feel the pinch.
Berlusconi recognised the problems some people had in making their pay check stretch to the end of the month, but said his administration was not at fault.
Instead he blamed Italy's economic woes on the surge in energy prices, the "hyper-valuation" of the euro currency against the dollar which had hurt Italian exports and restrictions imposed by the European Union on budget spending.