The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.

The committee's formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.

Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez's administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.

"The government of Venezuela doesn't have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process," the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.

Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country's elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004.

Seven months before that voting contract was awarded, a Venezuelan government financing agency invested more than $200,000 into a smaller technology company, owned by some of the same people as Smartmatic, that joined with Smartmatic as a minor partner in the bid.

In return, the government agency was given a 28 percent stake in the smaller company and a seat on its board, which was occupied by a senior government official who had previously advised Mr. Chávez on elections technology. But Venezuelan officials later insisted that the money was merely a small-business loan and that it was repaid before the referendum.

With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three contracts with Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more established Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Since its takeover by Smartmatic in March 2005, Sequoia has worked aggressively to market its voting machines in Latin America and other developing countries. "The goal is to create the world's leader in electronic voting solutions," said Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman.

But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.

"The government should know who owns our voting machines; that is a national security concern," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the Sequoia takeover.

"There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company," Ms. Maloney said of Smartmatic in a telephone interview yesterday. "The Cfius process, if it is moving forward, can determine that."

The concern over Smartmatic's purchase of Sequoia comes amid rising unease about the security of touch-screen voting machines and other electronic elections systems.

Government officials familiar with the Smartmatic inquiry said they doubted that even if the Chávez government was some kind of secret partner in the company, it would try to influence elections in the United States. But some of them speculated that the purchase of Sequoia could help Smartmatic sell its products in Latin America and other developing countries, where safeguards against fraud are weaker.

A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which oversees the foreign investment committee, said she could not comment on whether the panel was conducting a formal investigation.

"Cfius has been in contact with the company," said the spokeswoman, Brookly McLaughlin, citing discussions that were first disclosed in July. "It is important that the process is conducted in a professional and nonpolitical manner."

The committee has wide authority to review foreign investments in the United States that might have national security implications. In practice, though, it has focused mainly on foreign acquisitions of defense companies and other investments in traditional security realms.

Since the political furor over the Dubai ports deal, members of Congress from both parties have sought to widen the purview of such reviews to incorporate other emerging national security concerns.

In late July, the House and the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to expand the committee's scope, give a greater role to the office of the director of national intelligence and strengthen Congressional oversight of the review process.

But the Bush administration opposed major changes, and Congressional leaders did not act to reconcile the two bills before Congress adjourned.

Foreigners seeking to buy American companies in areas like defense manufacturing typically seek the committee's review themselves before going ahead with a purchase. Legal experts said it would be highly unusual for the panel to investigate a transaction like the Sequoia takeover, and even more unusual for the panel to try to nullify the transaction so long after it was completed.

It is unclear, moreover, what the government would need to uncover about the Sequoia sale to take such an action.

The investment committee's review typically involves an initial 30-day examination of any transactions that might pose a threat to national security, including a collective assessment from the intelligence community. Should concerns remain, one of the agencies involved can request an additional and more rigorous 45-day investigation.

In the case of the ports deal, the transaction was approved by the investment committee. But the Dubai company later abandoned the deal, agreeing to sell out to an American company after a barrage of criticism by legislators from both parties who said the administration had not adequately reviewed the deal or informed Congress about its implications.

The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chávez government have been well known to United States foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. Chávez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent.

Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.

At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said. "They did it all wrong," one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview.

Opposition members of Venezuela's electoral council had also protested that they were excluded from the bidding process in which Smartmatic and a smaller company, the Bizta Corporation, were selected to replace a $120 million system that had been built by Election Systems and Software of Omaha.

Smartmatic was then a fledgling technology start-up. Its registered address was the Boca Raton, Fla., home of the father of one of the two young Venezuelan engineers who were its principal officers, Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola, and it had a one-room office with a single secretary.

The company claimed to have only two going ventures, small contracts for secure communications software that a Smartmatic spokesman said had a total value of about $2 million.

At that point, Bizta amounted to even less. Company documents, first reported in 2004 by The Herald, showed the firm to be virtually dormant until it received the $200,000 investment from a fund controlled by the Venezuelan Finance Ministry, which took a 28 percent stake in return.

Weeks before Bizta and Smartmatic won the referendum contract, the government also placed a senior official of the Science Ministry, Omar Montilla, on Bizta's board, alongside Mr. Mugica and Mr. Anzola. Mr. Montilla, The Herald reported, had acted as an adviser to Mr. Chávez on elections technology.

More recent corporate documents show that before and after Smartmatic's purchase of Sequoia from a British-owned firm, the company was reorganized in an array of holding companies based in Delaware (Smartmatic International), the Netherlands (Smartmatic International Holding, B.V.), and Curaçao (Smartmatic International Group, N.V.). The firm's ownership was further shielded in two Curaçao trusts.

Mr. Stoller, the Smartmatic spokesman, said that the reorganization was done simply to help expand the company's international operations, and that it had not tried to hide its ownership, which he said was more than 75 percent in the hands of Mr. Mugica and his family.

"No foreign government or entity, including Venezuela, has ever held any stake in Smartmatic," Mr. Stoller said. "Smartmatic has always been a privately held company, and despite that, we've been fully transparent about the ownership of the corporation."

Mr. Stoller emphasized that Bizta was a separate company and said the shares the Venezuelan government received in it were "the guarantee for a loan."

Mr. Stoller also described concerns about the security of Sequoia's electronic systems as unfounded, given their certification by federal and state election agencies.

But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities. Smartmatic's new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help with the vote.

Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer, that was developed in Venezuela.

Bush's timeworn hostility for President Chávez is well known. Top secret US government documents released through Freedom of Information Act requests show that the administration's anti-Chávez operations may even pre-date the September 11th terrorist attacks and the launch of the "war on terror." According to human rights and international law expert writer Eva Golinger, leaders of the infamous April 2002 coup met with top Bush administration officials at least six months prior.

Golinger, who spoke with Political Affairs from Caracas by telephone, authored the 2005 book The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela. Translated into several languages and sold all over the world, The Chávez Code comprehensively revealed the role of the US government, through its military entities, diplomatic channels, and through funding agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), in helping to plan and execute the coup. Through its role in meeting with coup leader Pedro Carmona, provision of military equipment, and diplomatic pressure on regional governments to accept the coup as legitimate, the Bush administration played a decisive, multifaceted role in those illegal activities.

Documents Golinger unearthed during the investigation for her book showed that the CIA knew the exact details of the coup plan: stage a mass demonstration of political opponents of the administration, use sections of the Caracas police loyal to the opposition to provoke violence by shooting at the crowds, blame President Chávez for the violence, have military detachments with ties to the US military kidnap him, and then claim he had resigned. US government documents show, Golinger points out, that "part of the conspiracy was convincing the public, the media, and other governments that Chávez was responsible and therefore the coup was justified."

Once this plan was implemented, Carmona seized dictatorial power and by decree dissolved all of Venezuela's democratic institutions.

Immediately, Venezuelans rejected Carmona and demanded the release of President Chávez. His supporters organized huge demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people. Chavistas in the military found where he was being held and rescued him. In the days following the coup there was an enormous outpouring of support for Chávez that is impossible to imagine for any US politican.

Once the coup failed and Carmona was turned out, opposition political parties and groups, flush with US funds, planned and carried out an "economic sabotage," as Golinger describes it, that nearly crippled Venezuela's oil industry. In the Venezuelan and US press, they claimed that workers were protesting President Chávez by refusing to go to work. Venezuela's right-wing opposition, with the support of US taxpayer money, Bush strategists, and a little-known corporation with strong ties to the Pentagon, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), ironically labeled their action a "strike."

In truth, the managers who ran Venezuela's oil industry closed down the plants and refineries, locked the workers out, and even destroyed or damaged vital equipment. SAIC technicians, who, according to Golinger, provided and operated the information technology used by Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, aided the sabotage by shutting down computer systems that operated the plants or changing the code to disable them.

"That was actually the area the sabotage took place," Golinger reports. "It was a US company which forms part of the military industrial complex - anyone can look it up - they were the ones leading the sabotage efforts."

The sabotage failed as ordinary workers stood up for the government they had chosen and forced the plants to re-open. In both cases - the coup and the sabotage - the main leaders were only in rare cases held to account for their crimes. Many fled the country, some to the US where they were welcomed by their patrons in the Bush administration.

After the lockout and sabotage failed in January of 2003, the opposition and the US government turned to even more insidious and dangerous capers, Golinger states. In 2003, Venezuelan authorities uncovered a plot to assassinate President Chávez "involving paramilitaries coming over from Colombia" who had ties "to US Special Forces working in Colombia under Plan Colombia," Golinger says.

Under the pretense of controlling drug trafficking, US military personnel "had been using Colombian paramilitaries to conduct command and control operations for some time." According to Golinger's evidence, Colombian armed groups infiltrated all the way to "the metropolitan area of Caracas, not just the border." In all, some 100 Colombian paramilitaries were detained, many of whom were simply deported back to Colombia, while others were tried and imprisoned for their roles in the plot. Golinger points out that "high-level functionaries in the Colombian government, including President Uribe" admitted to this plot stating that "the paramilitaries and unfortunately some members of Colombia's intelligence" had been involved.

When these and other terrorist attacks failed to achieve the desired result, opposition groups turned their efforts to a legal mechanism for recalling a president. Ironically, this provision of the Venezuelan Constitution had been authored by a Constituent Assembly called by President Chávez. After a series of illegal attempts to force Chávez out of office, the US-backed political opposition sought to remove him through a procedure adopted by the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans.

For this, the opposition parties again sought and received massive financial and technical aid from the Bush administration and forced a referendum on Chávez's presidency in the summer of 2004. Despite the gobs of cash supposedly provided to "pro-democracy" groups, which in the case of Venezuela always happened to be linked with or supportive of the opposition, the recall campaign failed. Chávez received the highest number of votes any Venezuelan presidential candidate has ever received in an election judged to be fair and free by a consensus of international observers, including a team headed by former US President Jimmy Carter.

After a string of failures dating back to at least late 2001, it became clear that, in Golinger's words, "the US government underestimated the popularity the Chávez government has but also the strength of the Venezuelan people to resist these types of sabotage and destabilization efforts."

But habitual failure does not seem to deter the Bush administration. In this case, failure has only caused it to sharpen its open hostility towards Venezuela. Again, the money is flowing through the NED and USAID to Chávez's opponents. According to Golinger, who is about to publish a second book called Bush v. Chávez: Washington's War on Venezuela, which documents US interference since 2005, the Bush administration is "increasing that interference by providing funding, training, guidance, and other contacts, and other strategically important ways to support the opposition's presidential campaign here."

This time Chávez's opponent is Manuel Rosales, who unabashedly signed the Carmona decree in April 2002 dissolving the very democratic institutions he now wants to govern. Rosales's shady credentials, however, are more insidious than just ties to Carmona and the coup. According to Golinger, vice presidential candidate Julio Borges is meeting with administration officials later this month in Washington and will be speaking at a forum titled "Can Venezuela Be Saved?" held at the ultra-right American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

According to AEI's website, the event will be hosted by Roger Noriega, a fellow at AEI and former State Department official, whose deep dislike for Venezuela's popular president is unmistakably personal. Noriega happens to have been the one who deliberately lied to the US media about Chávez's phony resignation during the 2002 coup. (Noriega's media ploy, though subsequent White House press statements backed him up, reportedly angered then Secretary of State Colin Powell because Powell himself didn't believe that Chávez had resigned.) Noriega is also tied to organizations like USAID and the International Republican Institute which have funneled millions of US taxpayer dollars - in an era of record budget deficits - to political parties that oppose President Chávez. Presumably, Borges will be collecting a fat campaign check signed by the US taxpayer.

Aside from tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars financing Chávez's opponents, Golinger also points out that this time around the US role in the campaign amounts to "psychological warfare within Venezuela, but also in the international arena, and in the United States." The goal is "to make people think that Venezuela is a failed or failing state with a dictator, which is how the US government refers to him."

In addition to numerous personal attacks on President Chávez, the Bush administration has intensified its diplomatic maneuvers against Venezuela. One recent example is Bush's claim that Venezuela has failed to participate adequately in US-led anti-trafficking-in-persons efforts. As a result Bush unilaterally imposed economic sanctions on Venezuela. Golinger describes Bush's charges as "complete fantasy and fiction, because Venezuela has actually improved their trafficking in persons efforts."

In a related matter not raised by Golinger in this interview, the White House also has accused Venezuela of failing to combat the illegal drug trade and pointed to Venezuela's expulsion of Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) personnel in 2005 as evidence. This claim, however, was contradicted by State Department findings quietly released almost simultaneously that show Venezuela's own anti-drug operations have produced better results without assistance from the DEA. The Venezuelan government says that it sent the DEA officials home under suspicion of abusing their privileged status.

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also recently accused Venezuela of launching an arms race by purchasing new military equipment. According to Golinger, "just because Venezuela is finally buying some equipment and rifles to replace ones that are more than four decades old, does not imply they are starting an arms race." The administration's charges are belied by the fact that "Venezuela is not even on the list of the top five countries in this hemisphere in military budgets." With close to $500 billion spent annually on the military, the US is first, followed by "Brazil with about $13 billion, then Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina," Golinger asserts.

"Yet, Rumsfeld continues to make such declarations to international media, and it gets into the papers in the United States and other countries. The idea, of course, is to provide a perception that Venezuela is a danger," she adds. It is part of the Bush administration's "ongoing campaign to discredit and to isolate Venezuela from other nations in the region but also around the world."

Though diplomatically this campaign has failed, Golinger regards it as another level of interference in Venezuela's election. Bush and Rumsfeld's accusations, as unmerited as they may be, are repeated throughout the US and Venezuelan media. The point of the Bush administration's accusations is not to prove necessarily that Venezuela poses a real danger, says Golinger, but to convince portions of the Venezuelan population that maybe they would be better off with a president that does not provoke such responses from the US government. Indeed, statements from the US government have been carefully coordinated with opposition political campaigns, which have consistently played on fears of the people Venezuela about these issues.

Despite this level of interference, President Chávez maintains a wide lead in public opinion polls (+/- 25 points) and his supporters expect to turn out voters in record numbers again.

It is time for US taxpayers to call for an end to wasting money on these schemes. People who are honest about supporting real democracy should insist on building bridges and friendship with Venezuela rather than provoking hostility and prolonging ill will.

Let's face it, telling the truth about other governments and building democracy are among the Bush administration's weakest points. The US government should respect the choices of the Venezuelan people and their right to determine their own destiny - just as we expect other countries to respect ours. Can you imagine the uproar if another government chose to influence the US elections by secretly pumping millions of dollars to one of the parties or candidates? Imagine how angry you might feel if that government then had the nerve to turn around and claim they were "promoting democracy."

Let's tell our leaders to set aside political differences and personal grudges and work together with Venezuela for peace and friendship.

Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs magazine

Now, when our enemies have prematurely declared me dead or dying, it gives me pleasure to send this small film to my countrymen and friends, the statesman said, introducing the film shown on the Roundtable broadcast.

On July 31 Fidel Castro temporarily delegated his duties as leader of the country to First Vice President Raul Castro and informed the Cuban people on the state of his health.

Since then millions of Cubans have shown their support of the Revolution in events at work and in letters to the editor of Cuban media.

The country has remained normal, although it has taken precautions against any US aggression, and continued constructing its singular social model.

Rumsfeld's leadership of the bloody mission in Iraq has become a divisive issue in the Nov. 7 elections. Many Democrats and a few Republicans are calling for his resignation, but President Bush repeatedly has defended him. So did House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, during an appearance Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

"I think Donald Rumsfeld is the best thing that's happened to the Pentagon in 25 years," Boehner said. "This Pentagon and our military needs a transformation. And I think Donald Rumsfeld's the only man in America who knows where the bodies are buried at the Pentagon, has enough experience to help transform that institution."

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said voters will have their chance to show if they agree with Boehner on Election Day.

"It's true President Bush may not be on the ballot, but people like Boehner and people who support Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush, they're on the ballot," Rangel said on CNN's "Late Edition."

"And that's why we only get two years. You don't have to wait to get the president. This is a referendum on the war and the incompetency of the Bush administration."

Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic effort to win control of the House, quickly e-mailed a statement to reporters objecting to Boehner's comments and including quotes from seven military leaders criticizing the defense secretary.

"Congressman Boehner's defense of Donald Rumsfeld makes it crystal clear that we need change in Washington from the rubber stamp Republican Congress and their blind adherence to President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld's stay the course policy in Iraq," Emanuel's e-mail said.

Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, appearing with Rangel on CNN, said she has confidence in Rumsfeld.

"I think it's a shame to take this complex issue of winning the international war on terror and putting it at the level of whether you like or not like Donald Rumsfeld, and whether you like or don't like President Bush's personalities and the statements that he's made," she said.

Another Republican, Maryland Senate candidate Michael Steele, declined to back the Pentagon chief.

"He wouldn't be my secretary of defense," Steele said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And ultimately, that's going to be a decision that the president of the United States makes."

Ms Short may now be expelled from the party, although she said she wanted to remain a party member. She had been repeatedly warned that her support for a hung parliament meant she was opposed to the election of some Labour MPs.

Her resignation yesterday came as she faced the risk of formal censure by Labour's chief whip, Jacqui Smith, over her support for a hung parliament and her failure to attend key Commons votes.
Plans to ask the national executive to expel Ms Short from the party were shelved just before the Labour conference for fear they would overshadow what was likely to be an anyway highly charged gathering.

Ms Short said she had decided to leave the parliamentary party after being constantly "threatened" by the chief whip. "This is a sad, big thing for me. I just want to be free to say what I think to be true. I can't go on being rebuked every week by the chief whip," she said.

Her resignation led to a bout of recriminations yesterday, with the whips' office accusing her of leaking the news to the media, and Ms Short blaming the whips' office.

It is possible the news leaked after the Liberal Democrats tried to persuade her to follow the leftwing former Labour MP Brian Sedgemore and join them. She said pointedly in her resignation letter that she would remain a social democrat.

Her increasingly strident attacks on the government, and allegations of lying by colleagues, lost her support across the parliamentary party, even though she is admired for her personal warmth and record as international development secretary.

Her former ministerial colleague Lord Foulkes described her resignation of the Labour whip as "the equivalent of the final chapter of a modern Greek tragedy", adding: "Her career had been going down and down and down for months and months."

He said her fortunes turned when she voted for the Iraq war and subsequently resigned from the cabinet in May 2003. She had openly voiced her criticisms of the war, but Mr Blair persuaded her that she had a vital role to play as international development secretary in the reconstruction of Iraq. He also insisted he was using his influence to persuade the US to resolve the Palestinian issue.

Lord Foulkes said Mr Blair had given her a uniquely free rein and twice saved Ms Short from deselection by her constituency.

The anti-war MP Peter Kilfoyle described her decision to resign the Labour whip as a mistake, saying: "It is better always fight your corner from within."

Ms Short enjoyed a sometimes impish love-hate relationship with Mr Blair in the first term of the Labour government, but gradually her disillusionment tipped over into contempt and finally near hatred.

Unlike Robin Cook, who resigned as House of Commons leader before the war started, she openly accused Mr Blair of lying over the Iraq war in an attempt to win public backing.

In her autobiography, An Honourable Deception, she rejected the findings of the Butler inquiry that the prime minister acted in good faith over the war: "I am afraid it is clear that the prime minister did knowingly mislead." She also claimed that the then head of the civil service, Lord Turnbull, told her that Mr Blair had committed himself irrevocably in August 2002 to go to war as an ally of the US.

Like former home secretary David Blunkett in his memoirs published this month, she claimed that Gordon Brown supported the war only because he feared that otherwise he would be sacked as chancellor.

Ms Short was first elected MP for Birmingham Ladywood in 1983. She came to prominence with a campaign against the Sun newspaper's page three girls and her bill to ban them. In 1996 she stunned Westminster when she was reunited with her son Toby, who she had given up for adoption when she was 18.

Recently she expressed her opposition to the replacement of Trident, Blairite reform of the public services and what she described as government by diktat. She also campaigned for a law requiring a Commons vote before British troops go to war, and backed calls to impeach Mr Blair over the war. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon this year she accused the government of being complicit in war crimes.

As international development secretary, she fought to increase vastly the department's funding and in particular boosted aid for Africa.

With the merger Saturday of the Party of Life, the Rodina party and the Party of Pensioners, the system appears in place.

The new party, Just Russia: Motherland, Pensioners, Life, is to play the role of the center-left opposition. Its rival is to be the established, center-right United Russia.

"If United Russia is the party of power, we will become the party of the people," said Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov, who was elected Just Russia's leader Saturday.

"We will follow the course of President Vladimir Putin and will not allow anyone to veer from it after Putin leaves his post in 2008," Mironov said.

Mironov's comments came at a convention creating Just Russia.

At separate simultaneous conventions in Moscow, delegates from the Party of Life and the Party of Pensioners voted to strip their groups of party status, enabling members to apply for membership in Rodina.

Delegates at the conventions then voted to change Rodina's name to Just Russia. Rodina was selected as the core group of the new coalition party because it is the only one of the trio with seats in the State Duma, Rodina leader Alexander Babakov said.

Also on Saturday, Babakov was elected secretary of Just Russia's presidium, and Igor Zotov, leader of the Party of Pensioners, became secretary of its political council.

Despite varying widely in size, the parties were allotted equal shares of seats on the new party's governing panels.

Putin sent congratulations, saying the creation of Just Russia was "proof of a growing creative potential in Russian society."

The new party will hold a convention early next year to adopt a charter, and it will be registered soon after, giving Just Russia enough time to compete in regional legislature elections in March, Mironov said.

Using rhetoric similar to that of the Communist Party, Mironov said Just Russia sought to siphon votes away from the Communists by defending "the interests of working people." Fair hourly wages, pension reform and a more equitable distribution of the wealth derived from natural resources top the party's agenda, he said.

Mironov also decried United Russia's monopoly, as he sees it, of the nation's political, economic and "administrative" resources.

Noting that Rodina and the Party of Life were Kremlin concoctions, Vladimir Pribylovsky, an analyst with the Panorama think tank, said the new party would play a dual role in Russian politics. "It's the party of the president's left foot complementing the right foot of United Russia," he said. "It is also a party of the opposition of the master's maid to the master's butler."

Ms Gardini, herself an ex-actress, made a formal complaint to the Chamber of Deputies' house affairs committee. Peacemakers suggested that a third loo might be created for Mr Guadagno and his assistant, who is of a similar sexual orientation. But the spokesman for a Christian Democrat party that supports the centre-left government was adamant that "there are only two genders-male and female".

After a heated session the house affairs committee adroitly dodged the issue by saying that an MP's choice of loo was a personal one. The question has been taken up by the speaker's office who have promised a decision early this week.