ROME: Discussions began yesterday between the Italian president and political leaders to help him decide if the country should have early elections or be governed by an interim arrangement following the collapse of Romano Prodi’s government.

Prodi was forced to resign on Thursday night after 20 months of struggling at the helm of an often squabbling center-left coalition. A loss in a risky confidence vote in the Senate following the defection of lawmakers who had backed his coalition doomed his government.

Yesterday’s schedule of consultations for President Giorgio Napolitano were presidents of Parliament’s two branches: the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies.

Napolitano’s meetings will continue through Tuesday, when he will meet with Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, who heads the largest center-left party, the Democratic Party, and with former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, whose conservatives are the largest center-right opposition party.

Berlusconi is lobbying heavily for elections.

“Now, as quickly as possible, we need to give Italians a government that works,” said Berlusconi, who was defeated by Prodi in 2006 after five years as premier.

Napolitano, who is head of state, has said he does not want parliamentary elections until changes are made to the electoral system, which is widely blamed for fostering the country’s chronic political instability.

But Napolitano might not have much choice if he determines there is no consensus about having an interim government to carrying out the reforms.

Parliament has more than three years left on its five-year term.

Yesterday, members of parliament from the opposition center-right – who passed Italy’s existing electoral law when they were in power before Prodi – made clear they want elections now.

The opposition has more leverage following Prodi’s downfall on Thursday.

“It’s been months since (electoral reform) has been discussed, and there have been different positions registered by both the center-right and the center-left,” said Gianfranco Fini, leader of the right-wing National Alliance, who is widely considered to have his eye on the premier’s office.

The Senate voted 161-156 to sink Prodi’s government in a fiery session in which one senator was spat on, fainted and was carried out on a stretcher.

Elected in April 2006, Prodi’s government was plagued by infighting among parties ranging from pro-Vatican centrists to Communists and Greens. Earlier this week, a small Christian Democrat party yanked its support, depriving Prodi of a political majority in the Senate.

Berlusconi’s forces while in power changed the electoral law in 2005, giving disproportionate weight to small parties in Parliament.

They largely undid a reform to the electoral a decade earlier that had provided some measure of political stability to a country known for nearly a half-century of “revolving door governments.”

Prodi’s government was Italy’s 61st since the end of World War II.

The shift to full proportional representation, letting parties with as little as 2 percent of the vote get into Parliament, was widely seen as a way to placate Berlusconi’s tinier allies. By contrast, the threshold in Germany is 5 per cent.

“We should go to a vote and we should go with this law, which, despite its defects, guarantees representation and democracy,” said Roberto Calderoli of the right-wing Northern League, a Berlusconi ally.

But if Italy voted with the current system, Prodi said Friday as he headed into a meeting with Veltroni’s Democratic Party, “we’d reproduce all the Italian tragedies and all the political fragmentation of today.”

Analysts and news reports have floated several names of neutral, respected figures in recent days as possible heads of an interim government, including Italy’s central bank chief Mario Draghi, Mario Monti, a former EU anti-trust commissioner, or the current Senate speaker Franco Marini.

Marini insisted yesterday he had no such aspirations.

News reports have also suggested that Berlusconi’s longtime top aide, Gianni Letta, who is largely respected by the left as well, might get the not to try to form an interim government.

Italians seemed resigned to more uncertainty.

Businessman Armando Pontecorvo, 41, noted that mps have an interest in keeping Parliament in session until October, when their pensions kick in.