Italy Parliament Dissolved; Elections Set for March 27 : Europe: The prime minister will remain in a caretaker role. Jewish leaders protest the vote coincides with Passover.

After two years of tumult that eroded confidence in national leadership, Italy turned toward a new and uncertain political future Sunday as President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro dissolved a scandal-tarred Parliament and a lame-duck government summoned voters to landmark elections.

The March 27 vote will mark the end of a closely held political system that has ruled Italy in increasing prosperity and corruption since World War II.

Italians say the First Republic, born in the aftermath of war and fascism, is dead. In March, they will choose new faces under new rules to launch the Second Republic.

Climaxing weeks of maneuvering, on a wet, blustery Sunday, Scalfaro asked apolitical Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and his technocrat government to remain in office until the vote.

Scalfaro rejected a resignation that Ciampi proffered Thursday, meaning that the former Central Bank governor can remain in office without having to seek a new majority.

The Italian president agreed with Ciampi, however, that it is time for elections, citing “unequivocal facts that require early dissolution of Parliament.”

Among them, Scalfaro cited 80% support for electoral reform in a referendum last April and results in June and December municipal elections demonstrating that the Parliament no longer accurately represents political sentiment in the country.

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The four Establishment parties led by the Christian Democrats that hold the parliamentary majority, all of them tarnished by scandal, were overwhelmed in the mayoral votes by insurgents of the left and right.

Scalfaro also cited the demands of justice as one of his reasons for dissolving the Parliament: Nearly one-third of the 630 deputies and 315 elected senators face charges ranging from corruption to Mafia association but are protected by immunity while Parliament is in session.

About 3,000 business leaders, politicians and public officials have been ensnared so far in a two-year investigation into massive kickbacks for public contracts.

“The word now passes to the voters,” Scalfaro said in a letter to parliamentary leaders decreeing the dissolution of the 21-month-old legislature.

A two-hour Cabinet meeting chaired by Ciampi on Sunday set the March 27 date for the country’s voters, triggering an immediate protest from members of Italy’s small Jewish community and sympathetic opposition parties: Passover begins that day. The nation’s 30,000 Jewish voters must choose between religious obligation and civic responsibility in deciding whether to vote.

“People will have to follow their conscience,” said Tullia Zevi, president of the Italian Jewish community. “Even in Italy it is clear that although all religions are equal, some religions are more equal than others.”

Italian national television said that Ciampi went to the home of Italy’s chief rabbi Sunday night to apologize and to explain that the March 27 date was in effect imposed on his government.

“I suffered for not having been able to reconcile the needs of everyone,” Ciampi told reporters.

The constitution requires an election within 70 days of the dissolution of Parliament, and Ciampi was warned by government election experts that to call it earlier might jeopardize Italians’ ability to vote in some cities.

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Normally complex ballots will be even more convoluted in March.

Amid a surge of new parties, two-thirds of the deputies and senators will be elected directly, U.S.-style, for the first time, while the remainder will be chosen under the old system of proportional representation that has produced 52 weak coalition governments since World War II, all of them dominated by the now-disgraced Christian Democrats.

“It is a new and very complicated (electoral) law,” said Paolo Barile, the Cabinet minister responsible for relations with Parliament. He said that to have held the elections March 20, the alternative date, “would have been very dangerous.”

Former Communists, neo-fascists, northern-based separatists and reformers clamoring for a piece of the political center all hope to prosper in March at the expense of the Christian Democrats and their allies.