This week, David Cameron became not only the first Conservative prime minister of Britain for 13 years, but also the head of the country's first coalition government since the Second World War.
Concern has been raised that such an arrangement will prove inherently unstable and short-lived - yet so rare is a hung result in a UK general election, political pundits have little national history to draw on to substantiate this. And when looking elsewhere for inspiration, the evidence is hardly conclusive.
In Germany, for example, no single party has control of the country's parliament as of this week, when the governing centre-right CDU/FDP coalition lost control of North Rhine Westphalia, and so its majority. On face value, the fact that the arrangement struck by Chancellor Angela Merkel in September has lasted all of eight months seems to demonstrate such pacts are untenable.
UK voices opposing the abolition of the UK's first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system might also point to Belgium as vindication that proportional representation (PR) results in deadlock. In January, the prime minister resigned after the Flemish liberal party withdrew from the country's unwieldy five-faction coalition after only five months. It has also been argued that the reliance of the minority government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on smaller parties to pass law is fuelling ongoing market uncertainty about his ability to push through the economic reform required to prevent a Greek-style debt crisis.
On the other hand, there is a strong case that the strength of a coalition is dependent on national circumstances. Unlike Belgium and Spain - the former of which is so riven along French-Flemish lines that some commentators suggest it no longer exists as an entity - the UK has no nationalist or separatist factions on a scale that could break a government. And despite Germany's current woes, it is perhaps the previous CDU/SPD coalition, combining the centre-right with social democrats, which better reflects the new UK set-up; albeit not without problems, this lasted four years.
Outside Europe, New Zealand perhaps provides the best indication that the view that coalitions are doomed from the outset is unnecessarily pessimistic. Though no party has formed a majority since it moved from FPTP to PR in 1996, the country has operated under various arrangements - some looser, some stronger - without descending into chaos. The Irish Fianna Fáil/Green alliance has weathered the economic storm.
The future of the UK's Lib-Con pact may be ambiguous - but it is unlikely to prove catastrophic, and will certainly be interesting.
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