After days of uncertainty Britain gets David Cameron as its prime minister, at the head of a coalition government with Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats, in what is described by a senior commentator as "the toughest hand of cards ever dealt a new prime minister".
At 43, he is the youngest prime minister of Britain in two hundred years, comes of a high pedigree, and is committed to resurrecting the old-fashioned Conservative Party, something like Tony Blair was tasked by the New Labour. But Cameron doesn't have Blair's advantage; his vision and scope, both, are seriously reduced by the dictates of running a coalition government.
It's a case of strange bedfellows - right-of-the-centre Conservatives joining hands for with left-of-the-centre Liberal Democrats, with no recent history and experience of running a coalition government. But for the critical times that Britain faces today, such a give-and-take politics was perhaps not feasible. No wonder, it is a measure of Britain's mature politics that parties having different, and at times conflicting worldviews, have come together and formed a coalition government for the greater good of their country.
The David Cameron-headed coalition government is confronted with daunting challenges, the most serious being the all-time high budget deficit at about 12 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. This has to be brought down - if nothing else, but to escape the fate of Greece or what appears to be in the making in Portugal and Spain. Of course, Britain has the space - mainly for the reason that it is out of the Euro-zone - but that alone is not enough, mandating some hard decisions which may be at the cost of both the coalition partners' popularity at the next elections.
Then, Prime Minister Cameron has also been able to secure the agreement of the Liberal Democrats that they would not insist on stimulus spending, for a large part of the massive deficit has been caused by the government taking equity stakes in some of the major banks, in order to rescue them from insolvency. But the new government would not like to be seen to be unrealistic by either postponing difficult decisions, or by obfuscating the public mind on the hard issues confronting the national economy. How far the Britain ruled by the new coalition government would move away from the European Union also remains a question, though Nick Clegg is now agreeable to the Tory plan to hold referendum if the EU wants greater British integration into its system.
To what extent David Cameron succeeds in forming what he calls "a new government" is, at best, a matter of crystal gazing. He is handicapped, given that he doesn't have the majority in the parliament and Clegg as deputy prime minister with four of his men in the cabinet - 'a stark fusion of the political culture of the left and right' - would like to call his own shots. But this is also a fact that he would be presenting a new, fresh face of the Conservatives, as amply reflected from his acceptance speech.
In an apparent bid to balance the right wing values of his party with his electoral pledges to maintain the social safety net, he said: "I want to make sure my government always looks after the elderly, the frail, the poorest in our country". That, in the meanwhile, he gets the much-needed breather to put his feet on the ground comes in the wake of the seething disarray that tends to beset the Labour. Gordon Brown has resigned and his successor wouldn't be in place till September when the party would choose its new leader. However, the hung parliament presents its own dilemmas, the one most crucial being certainty of its survival for the term. David Cameron is rightly then confronted with the immense challenge to his political survival, particularly when he has to get off to some bad starts in fixing the economy.
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