Three former heads of government and two far-right leaders: Here, in alphabetical order, are the top five candidates for Italy’s general elections on Sunday.

A three-time prime minister who owns a media empire and a Serie A football club, Berlusconi may be 85 but his political ambitions are far from over.

His right-wing party, Forza Italia, scores just 8 percent in polls, but has joined forces with the far-right Brothers of Italy and the Anti-Immigrant League.

If the alliance wins, billionaire Berlusconi is hoping for the country’s second-highest office: president of the Senate.

As the final power struggle after his bid for Italy’s president failed in January, the Senate post would be prestigious – and granting him judicial immunity would be no small feat for a man currently on trial accused of paying asterisks to talk about his to keep silent about notorious parties.

Lawyer Conte had never been elected to office when he was asked to lead Italy’s government after the populist Five Star Movement’s overwhelming victory in the 2018 election.

First as “Mr. Dubbed Nobody,” Conte was seen as a safe pair of hands by many scared Italians when Italy became the first European country to face the full brunt of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

He eventually secured Italy the bulk, around 200 billion euros ($194 billion), of the EU’s massive post-virus recovery fund.

Plagued by power struggles, defectors, and the compromises needed to remain in power, Five Star lost much support. But Conte, 58, remains a popular leader, particularly among young people.

Letta, 56, has long been a fixture in Italian politics, becoming the republic’s youngest minister in 1998 at age 32 before rising to prime minister in 2013 – only to be ousted within a year.

The reserved, bespectacled international law expert has warned that the prospect of a far-right victory threatens democracy and Italy’s place in the post-war order from the European Union to NATO.

Opinion polls suggest his Democratic Party, which has allied itself with the ecological far-left, has almost no chance of beating the far-right alliance.

But Letta, fighting on a platform for social justice, the environment and civil rights, is pinning his hopes on the sizable minority of voters who have yet to decide.

Leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, Meloni, has gone from a teenage activist praising Mussolini to the favorite to become Italy’s first woman prime minister.

Her party secured just four percent of the vote in the 2018 general election, but now sits at more than 24 percent after a nationalist campaign focused on defending Italy’s interests and protecting traditional Catholic family values.

Meloni has benefited from being the only opposition party for the past 18 months after opting not to join outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s national unity government.

Her stance on Europe has softened over the years – she no longer wants Italy to leave the EU’s common currency and has been a strong supporter of the bloc’s sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine war.

But she says Rome needs to do more to defend its national interests and has backed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in his struggles with Brussels.

Salvini, 49, is credited with turning his once-regional league party into a national force thanks to his Eurosceptic Italians First platform.

He has been in and out of government since the last general election in 2018, joining the populist Five Star Movement and later Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s National Unity Coalition.

Salvini was just 17 years old when he switched to the then Liga Nord. After rising through the ranks, he turned his attention to the EU, the euro and the tens of thousands of migrants who arrive on Italy’s shores annually from North Africa.

But he has since been eclipsed by the more polished Giorgia Meloni.

The war in Ukraine has also put him in a difficult position, testing his ties to Russia, whose President Vladimir Putin he has long admired and even wears t-shirts with Putin’s face on it.