I WENT TO ITALY A WEEK BEFORE the April 21 election hoping to observe a politics different from ours. Instead, I was struck again and again by the similarities. Begin with campaign tactics. The leaders of the winning center4eft Ulivo coalition rolled into their final rally April 18 in il pullman — a big-windowed bus on which they had been campaigning across the country. Walter Veltroni, number-two man in both Ulivo and its largest party, the PDS, the former Communists, told the crowd of 150,000: “We went to hundreds of piazzas and listened to hundreds of thousands. We saw a lot of suffering. Just think of the workers in front of Fiat. How can they survive on 1,300,000 lira a month?”

While the Left was busy feeling Italians’ pain, the Right was busy issuing 10-point contracts with the voters: The Contratto con gli italiani, signed by all its candidates, was the chief campaign offering of the center- right Polo coalition.