Prodi quits Italy president race, leaving center-left in chaos By Barry Moody and Giselda Vagnoni ROME (Reuters) - Former Prime Minister Romano Prodi withdrew from the race for the Italian presidency on Friday, deepening the chaos in the center-left after party rebels helped his old enemy Silvio Berlusconi scupper his candidacy. The collapse of efforts by the center-left to secure the presidency for Prodi underlines the deep fractures running through politics in a country still seeking a government nearly two months after February's inconclusive general election. The politicians should be ashamed of what they're doing to the country. Today we're seeing a level of irresponsibility that goes beyond all limits," said Diego Della Valle, head of shoe group Tod's, one of Italy's most successful clothing companies. The presidency, an office elected by parliamentarians and regional representatives, is a largely ceremonial position, but is important at times of political instability like the present, when the president plays a major role in forming a government. Without a government, efforts to pull the euro zone's third-largest economy out of recession and pass meaningful reforms will remain blocked, while rising unemployment and declining living standards feed an increasingly bitter popular mood. Berlusconi's center-right group boycotted the vote for president and protested outside parliament, accusing center-left boss Pier Luigi Bersani of breaking a promise to put forward a candidate the center-right could accept. Many center-left rebels also refused to vote for Prodi, delivering the latest in a string of humiliating rebuffs for Bersani, whose leadership of the badly divided Democratic Party (PD) is under threat. Prodi's failure was stunning and embarrassing. What's left in the ballot box are the fragments of the PD," said Renato Brunetta, the leader of Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party in the lower house. In a sign of the PD's internal strife, its president Rosy Bindi announced late on Friday that she was quitting because she did not want to carry responsibility for the party's "poor showing" in recent weeks. The vote was the fourth in a complex election process by 1,007 electors from both houses of parliament and the regional representatives. Fifth and sixth votes are expected on Saturday. But the failure of four votes so far demonstrates the political animosity and uncertainty since the election in February, in which Bersani's bloc won the most votes but not enough to rule on its own. Since then, Bersani has failed to agree a ruling coalition with either Berlusconi on the center-right or former comedian Beppe Grillo, whose protest movement's unexpected electoral success has confounded the traditional parties. Prodi won only 395 votes, well short of the absolute majority of 504 he needed. Around 100 center-left rebels refused orders to vote for him in the secret ballot. The bitter battle over the presidency has underlined how hard it will be to reach political consensus on anything, let alone vital economic reforms or changing an electoral law that is one of the main causes of the current impasse. Bersani's selection of Prodi marked a dramatic about-turn, after he failed on Thursday to impose 80-year-old former Senate speaker Franco Marini on the center-left as presidential candidate under the terms of a deal with Berlusconi. Bersani hoped that reaching an accord with media tycoon Berlusconi would ease the path to the formation of a minority government. But furious PD opposition to any deal with the scandal-plagued billionaire, currently fighting two separate trials over sex charges and a tax fraud conviction, forced him to backtrack. Additional reporting by Paolo Biondi, Naomi O'Leary and Gavin Jones; Editing by David Stamp and Gavin Jones