ROME — Silvio Berlusconi, the idiosyncratic billionaire who already dominates much of Italy’s public life, snatched back political power in elections that ended Monday, heading a center-right coalition certain to make him prime minister for a third term.
But with a weak economy and frustration high that Italy has lost ground to the rest of Europe, it was unclear whether Italians voted for Mr. Berlusconi out of affection or, as many experts said, as the least bad choice after the nation weathered two years of inaction from the fractured center-left.
Still, Italy now returns to a singular sort of personal politics with Mr. Berlusconi as the unquestioned protagonist.
Rejecting the sober responsibility of the departing prime minister, Romano Prodi, Italians chose in a moment of national self-doubt a man whose dramas — the clowning and corruption scandals, his rocky relations with his wife and political partners, his growing hairline and ever browner hair — play out very much in public.
Mr. Berlusconi expressed “deep satisfaction” at his victory in a brief telephone call to a national television show.
But while his coalition won a convincing majority in both houses of Parliament, the victory came with much help from the Northern League, which advocates a federal system favoring the more prosperous north.
In 1994, that party caused Mr. Berlusconi’s first government to collapse — a history that center-left leaders made clear on Monday in defeat.
“A season of opposition now begins against a majority that will have a hard time keeping together things that are difficult to keep together,” said Walter Veltroni, 52, the former mayor of Rome and the leader of the Democratic Party who ran against Mr. Berlusconi. “I don’t know how long this majority will last.”
The Democratic Party will now be the largest opposition group.
Mr. Berlusconi, 71, Italy’s third-richest man and owner of media and sports businesses, did not give a victory speech. But in the phone call to the television station, Mr. Berlusconi, declaring himself “moved,” reached out to Mr. Veltroni to make changes most Italians say are needed to get Italy moving again. “We are always open to working together with the opposition,” he said.
Mr. Berlusconi will make a fuller statement Tuesday. But he promised immediate action on many of the problems vexing Italians, like the trash crisis in the south that has tarnished the nation’s image and the sale of the near-bankrupt national airline, Alitalia.
The election — called just two years after Mr. Berlusconi lost to Mr. Prodi — was considered one of the least exciting in memory, with many Italians doubting that either candidate could accomplish any meaningful change.
But in some basic ways, the election signaled a decisive shift in a nation whose politics have been unstable because of the narrow interests of its many small parties. Mr. Veltroni, heading the new Democratic Party, the result of a merger of the two largest center-left parties, had refused to run with far-left parties, as Mr. Prodi had done.
As a result, the ANSA news agency reported that the number of parties in the lower house of Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, would drop to just 6 from 26. For the first time since World War II, there will be no one in Parliament representing the Communist Party, which has long played an important part in leftist politics here. Mr. Veltroni, in fact, started his political career as a Communist.
Experts on the left and the right said — and in some cases lamented — that the election had shown a shift toward a more American- or British-style system of two dominant middle-ground parties.
“It’s a Waterloo,” said Tuesday’s headline in the moderate left daily Il Riformista.
Its editor, Antonio Polito, a departing senator from the now-defunct Margherita Party, said, “The left is disappearing for the first time in history.” Referring to Mr. Veltroni’s party, he added, “The only party that managed to save itself after two disastrous Prodi years is a party that is modeling itself after the Democratic or Labor Parties” in the United States and Britain, respectively.
Mr. Berlusconi’s spokesman, Paolo Bonaiuti, echoed the analysis. “Italy has rewarded a simplification of the political panorama,” he said.