ROME (AFX) - Italy's rival coalitions were meeting late Sunday in a bid to avoid a bruising parliamentary vote to choose the country's next president, after the opposition centre-right flatly rejected incoming prime minister Romano Prodi's candidate.
The talks involving party leaders and envoys from both sides were taking place in outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Rome offices.
Neither Berlusconi nor Prodi was present at the discussions, but they were represented by envoys appointed over the weekend to sound out each side over a consensus candidate.
Earlier, Berlusconi blasted Prodi's candidate, Massimo D'Alema, as an 'indecent proposal' to be the state president.
Berlusconi accused Prodi of pushing Italy to 'the limits of a democratic emergency' by standing by a candidate unacceptable to the centre-right because of his communist past.
D'Alema is president of the Democrats of the Left, Italy's former communist party.
The standoff threatens a long drawn-out voting process which could further delay the formation of a centre-left government, one month after Prodi's razor-thin victory in a national election.
Prodi must wait for a new president to be elected before he can form a government and has been under pressure from the left of his disparate Union coalition to back D'Alema.
D'Alema, 57, recently dropped out of an internal contest for the speakership of the lower house of parliament in what he said was an effort to preserve the unity of the coalition. However his party, the biggest in the Union, is insisting it receives a prominent institutional post.
'Up to now, the Union has put forward only one candidate, to which we cannot agree,' said outgoing deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini, leader of the right wing National Alliance party.
The centre-right was pressing Prodi's faction to consider a compromise candidate from a list including former EU Commissioner Mario Monti, left-leaning former prime minister Giuliano Amato, and centre-left Senate speaker Franco Marini, Italian media reports said.
More than 1,000 lawmakers in an electoral college drawn from both houses of parliament and representatives of Italy's 20 regions are to begin voting on a successor to President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi on Monday. Ciampi, 85, is due to step down at the end of his seven-year term on May 18.
Berlusconi, who lost the April 9 and 10 elections by a tiny majority, is insisting on a share of the institutional posts for his defeated centre-right, after the Union managed to install its own speakers in both houses of parliament.
'If we are not represented in the institutions, we will refuse to pay taxes. We will obstruct the parliament,' he told a meeting of his Forza Italia party in Milan.
'There is a risk of a real democratic emergency,' he said.
Berlusconi has already said his coalition would draw out the vote by backing his candidate, his outgoing undersecretary Gianni Letta, in the first three rounds.
Meanwhile, Prodi underlined the delicacy of negotiations by refusing to discuss the issue with journalists.
'Today we are not going to make any statements because tomorrow is an important day,' the former economics professor said after attending Sunday mass in Bologna.
A two-thirds majority is required to elect a president in the first three rounds of voting, and a simple majority after that.
Ciampi, a consensus candidate, was elected in one day in 1992. However, the election of his predecessor took 13 days.
The parliamentary vote begins on Monday at 4.00 pm. newsdesk@afxnews.com afp/ak COPYRIGHT Copyright AFX News Limited 2005. All rights reserved. The copying, republication or redistribution of AFX News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of AFX News. AFX News and AFX Financial News Logo are registered trademarks of AFX News Limited