Italian Premier Romano Prodi announced Friday he will not be the leader of a new centre-left party in the making here.
Prodi, 67, a long-time rival of centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi, said he plans to quit politics at the end of the current legislature.
"At the end of the legislature I will feel my task completed," Prodi said at a meeting to kickstart a new unified centre-left party modelled partly on the Democratic Party in the United States and partly on Britain's (New) Labour Party.
"Italy needs new leaders," said the two-time premier, 67, as the two biggest parties in his centre-left coalition met separately to discuss moves towards the 'Democratic Party'.
The current legislature runs until 2011 but some pundits see the Prodi government ending sooner because of a lack of stability and a wafer-thin majority in the Senate.
Addressing a special congress of the centre-left Catholic Daisy party (DL), the former European Commission chief stressed that the new formation should be bigger than the sum of its parts, and its "international position" was not as vexed a question as pundits believe.
A hot topic is which tradition the Democrats will look to - the great European social democracies or more conservative and centrist forces.
The DS wants to keep faith with the Socialist tradition it inherited, partly by default, after the graft-linked self-destruction of Italy's Socialists - but its prospective partner the Daisy (DL), strongly disagrees.
DS leader Piero Fassino is determined to put the Democrats into the European Socialist Party (PSE) caucus, of which the DS is an important part - but DL leader Francesco Rutelli is strenuously resisting the proposed move.
On Friday Rutelli, who is wooing disaffected members of the Berlusconi-led opposition, said it was "impossible" for the DL to join the PSE.
Because of its decision to merge with the more moderate and Catholic DL, the DS on Friday lost a leftist fringe which may teams up with other die-hard Communist parties in Prodi's eight-party alliance - again, over time.
At their own special congress, Fassino and other leaders waved an emotional goodbye to leftist Fabio Mussi who said he would be leading his faction into talks with the other hard-left parties.
The issue of who will lead the future Democratic Party has so far been the great unsaid at the DS and DL conferences.
Many newspaper pundits have tipped popular Rome mayor Walter Veltroni, a former DS leader, for the post.
Veltroni, an open admirer of the US Democrats who has published a book on Robert Kennedy, has long deflected suggestions he was waiting to take over when Prodi steps down.
Prodi is a university professor and former head of the now disbanded state conglomerate IRI under the once-dominant Christian Democrats, a seemingly indestructible party swept away by the Bribesville scandals of the early 1990s - along with the Socialists.
Left untainted by the scandals, he was anointed leader-in-waiting of the centre left when a DS-led coalition was defeated by billionaire media magnate-turned-politician Silvio Berlusconi in 1994.
He beat Berlusconi in the 1996 general election and left office when a leftist ally pulled his government down in 1998.
Berlusconi beat Rutelli in the 2001 general election and stayed in power for a full legislature, until 2006.
In the meantime, Prodi returned to lead the centre left after five years in Brussels and won the narrowest of victories over Berlusconi last April.
