The last polls permitted by Italian electoral law before Italy's April 9 parliamentary elections once again showed former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi's Union with a slim lead over Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's House of Freedoms coalition.

Prodi's coalition has maintained a consistent four-to-five point lead over Berlusconi's coalition for months. A closer look at the numbers along with recently amended electoral laws, however, suggests Berlusconi is poised to remain Italy's prime minister.

Berlusconi altered election laws in January, reinstating procedures used before 2001. Under the restored system, which employs single-party lists, voters must pick one party instead of voting for a coalition. Any party that fails to reach a 2 percent threshold cannot join Parliament, and their votes do not affect the final count, a shift that hurts Prodi more than Berlusconi.

A poll published in La Repubblica in mid-March shows that despite the Union coalition's lead, House of Freedoms will keep more votes. This is because parties that belong to the Union coalition, including the Party of Italian Communists, Popular Alliance, the Greens, Italy of Values, the Italian Democratic Socialists and other center-left parties all hover around the 2 percent threshold. If these parties fail to meet the threshold, Union would lose about 12 percent of its votes. Assuming the parties earning less than 2.2 percent in this poll will not meet the threshold, Prodi would lose 7.4 percent and Berlusconi would lose 2.5 percent of their respective votes. Overall, 12.1 percent of the vote would not count. Prodi and Berlusconi would thus have about 49 percent of the vote each. Breaking the statistical dead heat would then depend on one party -- the Communist Refoundation.

Currently part of the Union coalition, the Communist Refoundation has threatened to strike out on its own. If it does, Prodi would lose almost 7 percent of the vote, handing Berlusconi the victory. Prodi faced the same scenario with the Communist Refoundation in 2001, when he also ran against Berlusconi. To avoid a repeat of the last election, Prodi must therefore do some fast talking to keep the Communist Refoundation on his side.