During a final rally in the southern Italian city of Crotone, Berlusconi said: “The leaders of the Left don’t wash themselves much. When they go into the bathroom, and they don’t go often since they don’t wash much, they look in the mirror when they shave and surprise themselves.”

Mr Berlusconi has a reputation for disliking beards, seeing them as sign of left leaning political sympathies. His obsession with hygiene has also emerged from intercepts of his infamous “bunga bunga” parties.