Balkenende held 90 minutes of talks with the head of state at her working palace in The Hague early Monday, giving waiting journalists a wide berth upon his departure.

The queen then proceeded to meet the leaders of the country's two houses of parliament, political party chiefs and the deputy president of the council of state -- an advisory body.

"The queen is obtaining advice before she can determine what the next step will be," government spokesman Henk Brons said.

Balkenende tendered the resignations of the 12 Labour Party (PvdA) cabinet members to Queen Beatrix on Saturday, after the centre-left coalition crumbled over whether to extend the Dutch troop deployment in Afghanistan.

Following the latest in a string of public coalition spats, the Labour Party withdrew from the government insisting that the military deployment of some 1,950 Dutch troops must end this year as planned.

NATO had asked the Netherlands to extend its four-year-old mission, mainly in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan where opium production is high and the Taliban very active, by one year to August 2011.

The government issued a statement on Monday to say that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had thanked the Dutch premier in a telephone call "for the work that Dutch soldiers and development workers have done, and are still doing, in building the country."

After the PvdA's withdrawal from the government, Balkenende also offered to relinquish the 12 cabinet posts held by his own Christian Democratic (CDA) party, the majority coalition member, and the three posts of the smaller Christian Union (CU).

The Dutch monarch must now decide whether to accept the resignations and call early elections.

In talks scheduled to last into Monday night and resume Tuesday morning, Queen Beatrix met PvdA leader Wouter Bos, who was the vice premier and finance minister in Balkenende's cabinet, as well as CU leader Andre Rouvoet -- fellow vice premier and minister of youth and family affairs.

"I advised her that there will have to be elections as soon as possible," Bos said upon leaving the palace, adding this should be "somewhere around the end of May, beginning of June."

The queen was also due to meet the parliamentary leaders of all 10 political parties represented in the lower house, and one independent.

If the queen accepts the resignations, as widely expected, parliamentary elections will have to be brought forward. They had been scheduled for March 2011.

"Elections are likely to be held before the summer, by June at the latest," home affairs ministry spokesman Vincent van Steen has told AFP.

It is widely speculated that Balkenende may be appointed to lead a caretaker government until elections are held, with CDA and CU cabinet ministers taking over the portfolios left vacant by the PvdA.

In the Dutch system of proportional representation, it is nearly impossible for one party to win an absolute majority in the 150-seat parliament, and it can sometimes take months to cobble together a viable coalition government.

The former coalition partners themselves ruled out any chance of reconciliation without new elections.

The CDA held 41 seats in parliament, the PvdA 33 and the CU six.

The Dutch Afghan mission under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which started in 2006, has already been extended once by two years and has claimed the lives of 21 Dutch soldiers.

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