Italy is facing the prospect of a protracted Florida-style electoral wrangle caused by Silvio Berlusconi's refusal to accept the results of this week's parliamentary elections.

With official results giving his centre-left opponents a wafer-thin majority, Signor Berlusconi met President Ciampi for more than an hour last night to inform him of "innumerable irregularities" in the two-day election, which ended on Monday.

Citing government sources, major newspapers reported today that he had asked the President to sign a special decree ordering an unprecendented recount of 1.1 million spoiled votes, but Signor Ciampi refused.

Instead, Signor Berlusconi, who demanded that his opponent, Romano Prodi, be stripped of his victory, is considering using his power as caretaker Prime Minister to order a partial recount.

That move threw the country into full-blown political crisis and brougth comparisons with the 2000 US presidential election, when victory was handed to President Bush after a recount battle in Florida.

"At this point it is difficult not to fear a sort of Italian-style Florida. A long, destabilising confrontation over the regularity of more than one million votes," said the Milan daily Corriere della Sera newspaper in an editorial. "The only thing is that here one can’t see a final agreed conclusion."

Signor Berlusconi is the only prime minister to have served a full five-year term since democracy was restored to Italy after the death of Benito Mussolini and the country's defeat in the Second World War.

But after his meeting with Signor Ciampi, he gave no sign that he is willing to give up the office quite yet. "The result must, and will, change because there has been endless vote rigging in different places, all over Italy," he told reporters.

"Did you think you’d got rid of me," he added, with a smile.

Official Interior Ministry figures say that Signor Prodi's coalition won the contest for the lower house Chamber of Deputies by a mere 25,000 votes of the 38 million cast, although Italian election law guarantees the winner at least 55 per cent of seats in the chamber. It also enjoys a slender two-seat majority in the Senate.

The Berlusconi camp initially demanded a recount of 43,000 contested votes, then extended that demand to returns from all 60,000 polling stations, as well as more than one million spoilt ballot papers - 60 per cent fewer than the number of invalid votes cast in 2001.

Newspapers reported that the partial recount of contested ballot papers suggested that votes were being allocated to both blocs.

Corriere della Sera said that in one electoral college in the northern region Veneto, only four of 20 disputed ballot papers had been assigned to Signor Berlusconi’s Forza Italia after review. In Milan and Naples, the Left was winning back more votes than the right.

The Prime Minister has the backing of two of his House of Freedoms allies, the National Alliance and Northern League. The third, the Christian Democrat UDC, has maintained a dignified silence, although its leader, the outgoing parliamentary speak Pier Fernando Casini, said: "We can’t go on like this for the next two months."

The situation is complicated by the fact that Italy’s President, whose duty it is to swear in the new government, ends his seven-year term of office on May 18. Signor Ciampi, 85, has said he wants his successor to do the swearing-in, delaying the formation of a new government.

Among those calling for Signor Berlusconi to accept the result and step down from politics was Francesco Cossiga, a former Christian Democrat minister who served as president in the 1980s.

Signor Cossiga called on the Prime Minister to perform his "final service to the people and resign.. before he goes off to the Bahamas because now he is no longer anybody."

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