Italy's Senate speaker began talks Thursday aimed at finding enough consensus to overhaul the country's election rules before voters go to the polls again, according to The Associated Press. Senate Speaker Franco Marini was tapped Wednesday by Italy's president for what Marini himself described as a «heavy» job. He acknowledged there is little time to line up enough backing among political leaders for an interim government that would have one main task: electoral reform to limit the weight tiny parties have in Italy's coalitions. Last week, a tiny centrist ally helped bring down Romano Prodi's 20-month-old center-left government, which lost a Senate confidence vote because of defections. Prodi resigned and is staying on in a caretaker role until a new government is in place. Marini's consultations Thursday afternoon began with leaders of Italy's smaller parties. Talks with larger parties will last until early next week. Going into the talks, Marini told reporters he would seek «broad consensus ... to see if we can, in a brief time, succeed in changing the electoral law.» «It is a difficult road but maybe with good will and the clarity of the things I will say a window of opportunity will open,» he said. With Italy's president effectively ruling out efforts to form a new government with any staying power, parliamentary elections _ roughly three years ahead of schedule _ appear inevitable. Italians are waiting to learn just when they will vote and under what set of rules. Conservative opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi is demanding that elections be held as soon as possible. Opinion polls show his center-right bloc holding a lead of as much as a 10 percentage points over the center-left coalition that ended his five-year tenure as premier in 2006. President Giorgio Napolitano and several other leaders have said they would prefer to have Italians vote under revised rules aimed at lessening the chances that tiny parties would get disproportionate weight in future coalition governments. Former Premier Lamberto Dini, one of the defectors who helped sink Prodi, was among a handful of centrists indicating they might support Marini's efforts _ but he was pessimistic. Given the refusal of Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia party is parliament's biggest, to accept anything but an immediate call to the polls, «I don't believe that (Marini) will pull it off,» Dini was quoted as saying in the La Repubblica daily newspaper.
