National questions.

A REPUBLICAN Party that smiles upon Kelly Flinn in order to bridge the gender gap when married women are among its strongest supporters may be past helping. So the cumulative lessons of recent elections in Britain, Canada, France, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Italy -- and the United States -- will be lost upon it. Here goes, anyway.

The shape of post-Cold War politics is gradually becoming clear. The Left -- both social democrats and post-Communists -- is consolidating as it moves toward the center. For decades the Soviet threat made it almost impossible for democratic socialists to enter into coalitions with the Communists; the end of the Cold War has removed that barrier. Hence, Communists are now in both the French and the Italian governing coalitions.

If other things were equal, that would mean a sharp leftward shift in policy toward economic planning, high taxes, redistribution, and so on. But because these ideas were discredited by the very historic development that brought about a united Left -- the collapse of Soviet Communism -- left-wing parties increasingly espouse the free market and fiscal responsibility. The Labour parties of New Zealand and Australia led the way here, but they have been copied by the British Labour Party, the Italian post-Communists, the Canadian Liberals, and Clinton's New Democrats, with only the French Left holding out -- probably until the franc next goes into freefall.

That does not mean, of course, that left-wingers are all conservatives now, merely that their control-freakery has been diverted into other courses: mul- ticulturalism, feminism, environmentalism, race and gender preferences, and regulations of every kind. What the Left now offers is social engineering restrained by fiscal responsibility.

At the very moment when the Left is mounting this united attack, moreover, the Right is dividing against itself. Most parties of the Right are run by eco- nomic conservatives who, in varying degrees, have marginalized social, cultural, and national conservatives, ignored the concerns of such voters, and allowed their base to shrink while they nibbled at constituencies that are securely in Liberaldom's pocket, such as feminists. The predictable result --third parties -- has now happened.

Canada's Tories have been replaced as the official Opposition by the populist Reform Party and obliterated in the conservative West (see page 24). France's conservative coalition lost the recent election because the National Front siphoned off 15 per cent of the right-wing vote. New Zealand's National Party leads the governing coalition by courtesy of New Zealand First -- a breakaway Buchananite party which gained 13 per cent of the popular vote. In Australia, One Nation -- a new party founded in April by an outspoken fish-and-chip-shop proprietor, Pauline Hanson, who won a safe Labour seat as an independent -- has already racked up 12 per cent support in opinion polls, cutting the government's lead over Labour in half. Italy's National Alliance, a former neo-fascist party turned respectable, obtained 15 per cent in the 1996 elec- tions, which it saw as a "disappointing" result. In Austria's local elections, the Freedom Party ran level with the two major parties with 27 per cent because it won half of the working-class vote. Even Britain's Tories, who have generally tended to cultural and national conservatism, lost 4 per cent of their vote to small anti-Europe parties -- 4 per cent they could ill afford in a single-issue election where the single issue was "throw the Tories out." And in the U.S., Ross Perot's Reform Party got 8 per cent in a lean 1996 -- down from 19 per cent four years earlier.

Some of these parties, notably the National Front in France, are run by sinister extremists. Others are likely to fade away as their charismatic lead- ers lose interest or credibility. But the issues that fuel them -- the fraying of national unity, language questions, immigration reform, race and gender quotas -- are respectable conservative issues, and the voters they represent are a permanent part of the political scene. Republicans have a choice: they can win with them or lose without them.