Constitutional Court justice and ex-minister Sergio Mattarella looks set to be elected Italy's new president in the fourth round of voting for a new head of State, which got underway on Saturday.
The candidate proposed by Premier Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party (PD) has the support of several other parties and is expected to win more than the 505 votes needed to prevail.
The majority needed to elect the president has dropped to a simple majority of the 1,009 so-called grand electors - lawmakers from both houses of parliament and regional representatives.
A two-thirds majority was needed in the first three ballots, which were inconclusive after the PD and several other groups cast blank papers.
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.
Mattarella also has the backing of the opposition Left, Ecology and Freedom (SEL) party, as well the New Centre Left (NCD) of Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, a junior partner in Renzi's coalition government.
The NCD's support was somewhat grudging, as Alfano criticised the "method" used to come up with the candidate.
Furthermore, several senior NCD members quit from the positions in the party in protest at the decision to support Mattarella, a former member of the once-dominant but now-defunct Christian Democrat (DC) party.
Three-time premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI) party is casting blank papers in the fourth round of voting.
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.
Renzi on Friday called on Italy's other parties in parliament to support his candidate, describing him as a "gentleman". "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". 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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