A Coalition of the Willing In Great Britain

Now that the question of who will lead the country is settled, politicians can get down to answering the more important query: can a coalition government work in Britain? There hasn't been one since World War II, and Britons are famously skeptical of them. Yet after the general election left no party with an outright majority, the Conservatives, who won the largest chunk of the vote, agreed to govern with the third-place finishers, the Liberal Democrats. Bookmakers are offering odds of less than 2-1 that the coalition will survive longer than a year, and financiers are nervous that the tandem won't be able to agree on how to rein in the national debt. According to the skeptics, Prime Minister David Cameron's brave talk of "a new politics" where "cooperation wins out over confrontation" disguises a fragile deal struck for reasons of expedience.

But despite the odds, the evidence so far suggests that the spirit of cooperation and compromise is alive and well in 10 Downing Street. The parties' joint program, announced last week, deals squarely with many of the issues that divided them in the past. The Liberal Democrats, for example, have accepted the Conservatives' plans for spending cuts of $9 billion this year rather than the more gradual approach their leader Nick Clegg advocated during the campaign. As part of a package of tradeoffs, the pro-Europe Lib Dems have gotten the Conservatives to drop some of their anti-EU positions and to promise a referendum on voting reform, a longtime goal for a party that is a perennial also ran.

The truth is that there is less difference between Cameron and Clegg than many in their own parties might like to admit. On the economy, Clegg represents a strain of free-market thinking that's familiar to Conservatives but alien to the older, left-leaning faction in his own party. Cameron, for his part, has been nudging his colleagues toward a more liberal stance on issues such as gay rights, civil liberties, and green causes. In fact, the coalition may strengthen Cameron in his efforts to modernize his party's politics, which hardliners are sure to resist. Cameron can reasonably overcome such stubbornness by arguing that moderation is a small price to pay for keeping the coalition together and staying in power. Clegg, too, faces hardliners from the other extreme, giving him a similar set of incentives. After all, the coalition's unraveling risks putting an end to the political careers of both men. Confrontation would be bad for the country, but worse for Cameron and Clegg.