THE SPECTATOR
VIVE LA COHABITATION
C4 ohabitation.' The very word carries an intimation of naughtiness, a hint of the risque. Unlike marriage, we expect 'coha- bitation' to be neither stable nor durable but fun while it lasts. Yet the phenomenon of the week is the calm sobriety, the self-conscious maturity, with which a French President of the Left prepares to share house with a government of the Right, and vice versa. De Gaulle certainly never envisaged anything of the kind when he established the Fifth Republic. In the Gaullist order, the relationship between president and prime minister was like that between a very grand, chauvinist husband, and his capable but thoroughly subservient Wife. There was no question who wore the trousers. Yet all likely parties to the Unprecedented new arrangement seem de- termined to prove that 'cohabitation' can be as sober and respectable as any mar- riage. There seem to be two main elements ill this extraordinary demonstration of Maturity. One is a straightforward feeling that whatever the intrinsic flaws in the Present constitutional arrangements, the Point is to try to make them work; that whatever the Fifth Republic is, it must not be the Fourth. But this sense of shared constitutional responsibility is itself a symptom of a deeper political change. 'The growth of the centre' would be one way to characterise it. The extremists of the Left ---- the Communists, who want another Republic altogether — polled their lowest vote since 1932. Alas, the extremists of the Right — the National Front, led by the execrable M. Le Pen — gained more votes than the Communists lost, but fortunately the moderate Right still has a majority without them. Between this moderate Right and President Mitterrand's Socialist Party there is now more common ground on major issues of substance than was conceivable five years ago. Perhaps a more accurate way to characterise this change, however, is to talk not about the 'growth of the centre' but about a metamorphosis of the Left. This has an intellectual pre- history in the decade from 1968 to 1978, when Marxism suddenly vanished away from the Parisian intellectual life which it had so spuriously dominated since the war. Yet the language, imagery and myths of the old Left still remained predominant among large sections of the political na- tion. The belief was still widespread that if only the Left could get their hands on the controls of the central state, then the state, through the sovereign exercise of Reason, would effortlessly solve such contingent problems as poverty, inequality and human suffering. Of course the only cure for this nonsense was for the Left to try it. This they have now done — and what a salutary experience it has been! The Mitterrand government introduced a few of its sweep- ing, hyper-rational socialist solutions. They failed. And then — with commendable rapidity — it returned to more pragmatic, commonsensical and essentially social democratic policies. As a result France now has not only a new government but also a genuinely new Left, a Left wholly disillusioned with communism, vigorously (almost alarmingly) in favour of a strong nuclear defence, and joyfully (almost lust- fully) embracing private enterprise, dereg- ulation, and even American-style commer- cialism: a new Left beside which our own weary old 'New Left' is shown up for the dinosaur it is. (Compare the New States- man with Liberation.) Yet for all this good news, the problems with 'cohabitation' still remain formidable. Even the President of the Left and the three main leaders of the moderate Right held identical views on every major issue of substance, the clash of political ambitions between them would still guarantee a lively time. M. Mitterrand has grandly staked out the whole area of foreign and defence policy as his own presidential preserve. Ex-President Gis- card d'Estaing will be a formidable pre- sence, in or out of ministerial office. The mysteriously popular Raymond Barre turns up his nose at cohabitation: he wants to be undisputed master in the house. And M. Chirac is actually Prime Minister. As friendly neighbours, we wish them all well in their new accomodation. But we shall not be altogether surprised if we hear raised voices through the partition wall, and the sound of crashing dishes from the kitchen.
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