Israel's President Moshe Katsav is meeting with senior politicians as part of a move to decide on the country's next government.
President Katsav first met with members of interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's centrist Kadima party, which won the most parliamentary seats in last week's election.
He then held talks with the centre-left Labour Party, which came second. Discussions with all parties that won seats are likely to last several days.
Katsav said he would try to choose a candidate quickly to begin the task of forming a government. Kadima, which fared worse in the elections than predicted, said it wanted to build a broad coalition. It took 29 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Labour is expected to join a Kadima-led coalition, although a sticking point could be who will get the vital post of finance minister, a job Labour sees as vital to its social programme.
"A wide government will provide stability to enable the government to make decisions, stand by them ... and fulfil its full term," senior Kadima official Roni Bar-On said.
"The 'convergence plan' will be an inseparable part of the government's guidelines," Bar-On said, referring to Olmert's proposal to remove settlers from swathes of the occupied West Bank if peacemaking with the Palestinians stays frozen.
Israel would keep major settlement blocs under the plan and trace a border along a barrier it is building in the West Bank, where 240,000 Israelis live among 2.4 million Palestinians.
Palestinians condemn such a move, saying it would annex land and deny the viable state they seek in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.