ROME (AFP) — Italian President Giorgio Napolitano launched crisis talks with political leaders on Friday after the collapse of prime minister Romano Prodi's centre-left government.
Kicking off a five-day marathon of consultations, the president met with Senate speaker Franco Marini and his Chamber of Deputies counterpart Fausto Bertinotti amid strident calls for fresh elections from the centre-right opposition.
Observers say Napolitano is unlikely to send voters back to the ballot box before Italy's widely criticised electoral law is overhauled.
Conservative opposition leader and former prime minister Berlusconi, now 71, and right-wing National Alliance leader Gianfranco Fini repeated calls for fresh elections moments after Prodi's resignation Thursday.
The flamboyant Berlusconi, Italy's richest man, clearly wants to take advantage of the left's plunging popularity: three recent voter surveys show the Italian right with double-digit leads over the left.
Prodi, too busy struggling to keep his squabbling coalition together, was unable to address many pocketbook issues over his 20 months in office even while returning Italy to economic growth after years in the red under Berlusconi.
Marini, 74, a trade unionist and member of the centrist Catholic Daisy party, is among possible choices to head a transitional government along with Mario Monti, a former EU commissioner for competition, and Bank of Italy chief Mario Draghi.
Prodi, speaking to reporters on Friday, added his voice to calls for electoral reforms ahead of fresh elections. "How can we go to the polls with this law? We will only repeat all of Italy's existing tragedies and political fragmentation," he told reporters.
The current system's worst flaw is that it allows tiny parties -- such as the centrist UDEUR, whose defection cost the 68-year-old Prodi his job -- to be represented in parliament.
Also Friday, the vanquished leader said he did not want to head a transition government but instead "be the grandfather," in a hint that he is considering leaving politics for good.
Prodi is to leave next Tuesday for a meeting on the world economic situation with British, German and French leaders Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the caretaker prime minister's office said Friday.
A separate communique said planned meetings with US President George W. Bush in Washington and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Rome have been cancelled.
Prodi, who was brought down by communist allies during his first stint as prime minister between 1996 and 1998, was undone this time around by defections from the centre.
After losing the support of the centrist Catholic UDEUR party, the centre-left leader braved Thursday's ordeal in the Senate despite appeals from top leaders, including Napolitano, to resign instead.
Despite the support of five senators for life and a last-minute change of heart by one of UDEUR's three senators, Prodi fell five votes short.
Berlusconi, who owns a vast media empire, lost by just some 24,000 votes to Prodi in the hard-fought elections of April 2006.
It was in anticipation of those elections that the Berlusconi government pushed through a new electoral law with the goal of limiting the extent of an expected win by the left.
The changes, which succeeded in producing the legislative gridlock that hastened Prodi's downfall, passed in a strictly partisan vote in December 2005.
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