Electoral reform remained in the spotlight on Monday after opposition chief Silvio Berlusconi announced that his centre-right coalition had agreed on a reform plan.
Speaking to reporters after a meeting with his two allies, the rightist National Alliance (AN) and the devolutionist Northern League, the former premier said: "We reached agreement on several important issues, including the electoral bill to present to the government".
When it was in power, Berlusconi's coalition pushed through a controversial electoral reform which returned Italy to full proportional representation (PR) after a break of 13 years.
The reform has been criticised as complex and muddled and been blamed by parties on both sides for creating political instability and the risk of hung parliaments in a country which has seen more than 60 postwar governments.
The law was approved just four months before the April 2006 general election, which was narrowly won by centre-left chief Romano Prodi.
Critics said the reform was designed mainly to create problems for Prodi because it would encourage the clutch of small parties in his nine-way coalition to battle for visibility.
Another key provision was the mechanism attributing an extra packet of seats to the winning coalition so as to ensure it had a workable majority in the House.
But in the Senate, where the seats are calculated on a regional basis, Prodi won only two more seats than Berlusconi.
All parties agree that the new system needs revising and President Giorgio Napolitano has urged the government and opposition to open talks as soon as possible.
Northern League heavyweight and former reform minister, who helped draft the current law, met with Napolitano on Monday afternoon to discuss the opposition's ideas.
Berlusconi gave few details beyond saying that it was willing to introduce representation thresholds for parties to prevent "the excessive fractionisation of parties in parliament".
While the centre-left government agrees that the reform is a priority, it is divided on the issue of PR.
Most centre-left parties are determined to retain PR - six of them gained less than 2.6% of the vote in the last general election and would have been penalised by the previous first-past-the-post system.
The Communist Refoundation Party, an influential group which won almost 6%, is also staunchly pro-PR.
But the Democratic Left, the largest party, and Prodi himself are firmly against it.
Both coalitions, meanwhile, are keen to agree on a reform before a referendum campaign gets under way and takes the issue out of their hands.
The referendum is being promoted by a 158-strong committee which includes civil rights activists and politicians from both sides and its main aim is to force parties to run singularly rather than in coalitions.
With the application of cut-off thresholds, this would slash the number of parties in parliament, eliminating the smaller ones, and encourage parties to merge.
