ROME: Italy's main centre-left party chose former Prime Minister Romano Prodi as its presidential candidate on Friday, setting up a battle with Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right that raises the chance of a snap election in the summer.
Berlusconi's camp immediately rejected Prodi, one of the media billionaire's oldest enemies, saying his election was likely to prevent any government being formed and lead to new polls, possibly as soon as late June or early July.
The vote for the next head of state to succeed Giorgio Napolitano, whose term ends on May 15, is a central step in efforts to break the stalemate since elections in February which left no party able to govern alone.
The euro zone's third-largest economy has been without an effective administration for months while the election campaign and the long deadlock since have stalled any action to combat a recession that matches the longest since World War Two.
But the bitter battle over the presidency has underlined how hard it will be to reach political consensus on vital reforms to the economy or an electoral law that is one of the main causes of the current impasse.
The election left the centre-left short of the majority it would need to govern, giving Berlusconi a kingmaker role in appointing both a government and the next president, who is elected by parliament and representatives from Italy's regions.
The former prime minister has repeatedly said the nomination of a broadly accepted presidential candidate was the only way to form a government capable of facing Italy's problems and avoiding an immediate return to the polls.
Prodi's selection marked an about-turn for centre-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani, after he failed to impose 80-year-old former Senate speaker Franco Marini on his Democratic Party (PD) as presidential candidate in a deal with Berlusconi.
PD president Rosy Bindi said the unanimous choice of Prodi, a former European Commission chief, had removed the threat of a party split.
"At this moment our country needs an institutional dialogue on reforms and this can happen if Romano Prodi is in the president's office," she told reporters. "He is more qualified than anyone else to do this."
But Fabrizio Cicchito, a close Berlusconi ally, suggested the choice had pushed the country closer to a new election. "If the PD is answering us in this fashion, it's not us choosing elections, it's the PD that's adopting a position of total opposition to us," he said.
VOTING STARTS
Italy's president is elected by a joint sitting of the two houses of parliament joined by 58 regional delegates in a complex process that usually needs several rounds of voting.
Marini fell far short of the two thirds majority required for election after dozens of centre-left rebels cast blank ballots or voted against him in the first round on Thursday, sinking his candidacy and forcing Bersani to change tack.
Bersani, who failed to win a viable parliamentary majority in February despite a big opinion poll lead beforehand, hoped that reaching an accord with Berlusconi would ease the path to the formation of a minority government.
But furious party opposition to any deal with the scandal-plagued Berlusconi, currently fighting two separate trials over sex charges and a tax fraud conviction, forced him to backtrack.
The leftist Left, Ecology Freedom party, which refused to back Marini, said it would support Prodi.
However the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement said it was maintaining its candidate, leftist academic Stefano Rodota, withdrew from the race.
Outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti's small centrist group, possibly a vital player in the final stages of the vote, said it would back Anna Maria Cancellieri, the interior minister in Monti's technocrat government.
Berlusconi's PDL party said they were considering voting for her as well.
The first three rounds require a two thirds majority but in subsequent rounds starting on Friday afternoon only a simple majority is necessary, meaning that Prodi could pass with the additional support of centrists or the 5-Star Movement.
The third vote was being held on Friday morning but was unlikely to produce a result.
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