Saturday's fourth round of voting to elect Italy's new president is set to be a key test for Premier Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party (PD) candidate, Constitutional Court justice and ex-minister Sergio Mattarella. As expected the second and third ballots on Friday were inconclusive, like the first vote on Thursday, after the PD and several other parties ordered their members to cast blank ballots.
Renzi is aiming to get Mattarella elected as the successor to 89-year-old Giorgio Napolitano, who resigned this month, in the fourth round when the number of votes needed to elect a new head of State drops to a simple majority of the 1,009 so-called grand electors - 505.
In the first three rounds a two-thirds majority of the 'grand electors' - lawmakers from both houses of parliament and regional representatives - was needed. The PD, which has been hit by internal splits over many issues in recent months, looks to have regained unity and its grand electors are expected to vote solidly in favour of Mattarella.
If so, it will contrast with the 2013 presidential election, when two candidates proposed by then-PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani were scuppered by internal revolts.
But the decision to nominate Mattarella, a former member of the once-dominant but now-defunct Christian Democrat (DC) party, has angered three-time premier Silvio Berlusconi and caused turmoil within his opposition, centre-right Forza Italia party.
Berlusconi has said that, by choosing a candidate he is unhappy with, Renzi has broken the terms of the so-called Nazareno Pact they struck last year for a new election law and a revamp of Italy's slow, costly political system. In Italy the president is a figurehead of national unity and the arbiter of Italian politics. Mattarella once resigned as minister rather than vote a broadcasting law that favored Berlusconi's Mediaset empire.
The FI whips said Friday that the party will cast blank papers again in the fourth.
But Mattarella is expected to prevail, as several other parties, including the opposition Left, Ecology and Freedom (SEL) group, have said they will back him.
There is even speculation that the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) may vote for Mattarella - if only to fan the flames of resentment between Berlusconi and Renzi.
M5S lawmakers said Friday that the movement may hold a snap Internet poll of supporters to decide what to do in the fourth round.
In the first three rounds of presidential ballots, the M5S voted for magistrate Ferdinando Imposimato after he came top in an online poll of supporters Several lawmakers who have left or been ejected from the M5S are tipped to vote for Mattarella too. A number of MPs from Interior Minister Angelino Alfano's New Centre Right (NCD) party criticised Renzi's decision.
But Alfano is reportedly considering getting the party, a junior partner in the ruling coalition, and its centrist UDC allies to vote Mattarella to avoid disrupting the executive.
Renzi on Friday called on Italy's other parties in parliament to support his candidate. "The hope is that there is the broadest agreement possible for the good of Italy," Renzi said, stressing that it was "a choice that involves everyone and not just one party". But senior FI member Giovanni Toti said Renzi's appeal was "too little too late". Mattarella, 73, became a founding member of Renzi's PD years after the DC folded, and is also famous for being the architect of Italy's last-but-one election law, the so-called Mattarellum. Mattarella's brother, Piersanti Mattarella, also a DC man, was murdered by the Mafia in 1980 while he was governor of Sicily. His father, Bernardo Mattarella, served as a DC cabinet minister several times in the 1950s and 1960s.
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