ROME — Italy held a primary runoff Sunday for a center-left candidate to run as premier in next year's election — an important ballot given that Italy's center-right camp is in utter disarray over whether former Premier Silvio Berlusconi will run again.

Sunday's runoff pitted veteran Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who campaigned on an Obama-style "Let's change Italy now" mantra and attracted many disgruntled Italians back to politics with his call to "scrap" the old political order.

Nearly all polls show Bersani, leader of the main center-left Democratic Party, winning the primary, since he won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote to Renzi's 35.5 percent.

Even before the polls closed Sunday, analysts were already discussing the potential that Bersani could well be Italy's next premier. Nevertheless, Renzi will have won a victory of sorts in knowing that he has forever changed the Italian left.

Renzi's perceived conservative leanings, while alienating the left's hard-core communists, attracted Italians young and old who have grown disenchanted with Italy's political class after a spate of corruption and party finance scandals, analyst Luca Ricolfi wrote in the La Stampa newspaper.

"Even if he loses, as I think he will, he had an important renovation function within the party," Rome resident Pietro Marucci said Sunday as he voted for Renzi.

Renzi's style — moving around Italy in a motor home to meet crowds, addressing supporters in just a shirt and tie, no jacket —attracted quite a following and drew inevitable comparisons to Barack Obama. But some analysts said he was simply not yet ready for the job of running Italy, and that his relaxed, fresh approach to politics isn't what Italy needs as it navigates through a grinding recession, near-record high unemployment and tries to tackle its enormous public debt of (E)2 trillion ($2.5 trillion).

"Italy certainly badly needs new faces, fresh faces," commentator Massimo Franco said. "But I think that between Renzi and Bersani, the big problem is also experience."

Renzi shot back at that charge during a debate this week, asking Bersani, who served as transport and industry minister in previous center-left governments, what he had accomplished in his 2,547 days in government.

The 2013 general election — expected in March or April — will decide how Italy continues on a path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis. The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-Premier Berlusconi's ability to reign in Italy's public debt and push through structural reforms.

Berlusconi has largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year — until recent weeks, when he announced he was thinking about running again, then changed his mind, then threatened to bring down Monti's government, and then stayed silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray and disrupted its plans for a primary.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo. Berlusconi's party was in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.

It's been quite a turnabout both for Berlusconi's once-dominant movement and the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi's professional and personal failings.

Another unknown is Monti's political future. He has ruled out running for office but has said he would be willing to stay on in some capacity if he could be of service. Some commentators have floated the idea of Monti taking over the largely ceremonial role as Italian president, while others say his talents would put to better use as treasury minister.