Governors of three central banks have openly raised the option of a Greek exit.

“Technically it could be managed,” said Patrick Honohan, the Irish governor. “It is not necessarily fatal, but it is not attractive.”

Even Jose Manuel Barroso, the usually cautious president of the European Commission, had a stark warning for the Greeks: “If a member of a club does not respect the rules of the club, it’s better not to remain in the club,” he told Italy’s Tg24 TV last week.

In the corridors of the European Union’s headquarters the fear now is not only that Greece could be forced out, but that the resultant chaos would spread quickly to Portugal, Ireland, Spain and beyond, causing a collapse of the euro currency and a generalized economic meltdown.

The prospect has more than just Europe worried. For all its problems, the eurozone’s $13.6 trillion economy remains the world’s second largest. Its collapse would risk a global economic earthquake making Lehman Brothers look like a mild tremor.

“This is not just about Europe, there is a possibility that it may spread to the global economy,” Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda told Dow Jones Newswires over the weekend. “This is the biggest downside risk factor for the Japanese economy.”

The doomsday scenario is not yet inevitable, but unless European leaders get their response right, the dominoes could start to fall very quickly.

Greece could be forced into a rerun of its inconclusive May 6 election in mid-June. Polls predict an even stronger showing for the mishmash of Trotskyites, neo-Nazis and other anti-austerity groups who surged in support triggered the current impasse.

They want Greece to renege on commitments to cut its huge budget deficit in exchange for the 130 billion euro bailout. Germany and other creditors have warned that would lead to a freezing of bailout payments. A bankrupt Greece would then be forced to drop out of the eurozone.

As that prospect draws near, savers facing the threat of exchanging their euros for a much weaker new national currency could spark a run on the banks and send their money to Germany or some other safe haven. Some reports suggest Greeks have already transferred 250 billion euro out of the country.

Renewed fears over Greece are already having a major impact on other at-risk countries. Portugal’s stock index hit its lowest level since 1996 on Monday and Italy and Spain both saw rates on their bonds rise to the highest levels this year.

If Greece heads toward a euro exit, creditors would send those rates soaring, casting doubt on the nations’ ability to pay their debts. Savers in Portugal, Ireland and Spain could also take fright and move their money abroad. Shaky banks would implode. G-8 economies Italy and France would come under threat.

Saving the euro, at that point, would need a massive intervention by the European Central Bank, backed by increased firewall funding from Germany and other more stable northern European nations to prop up the southerners. An agreement to share debt burdens or devalue the euro may also be required.

It is by no means certain, however, that skeptical voters in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria would go along with that. The incoming Socialist administration in France and restless political parties in Italy could also rebel against austerity measures which the northerners are likely to insist upon as part of a new financing deal.

Ireland could rule itself out of any future EU bailouts, if its austerity weary voters reject the EU’s fiscal discipline treaty in a May 31 referendum.

As eurozone finance ministers gathered in Brussels on Monday evening, officials in Brussels were acknowledging that the risk of a Greek exit — they are calling it the “grexit” — is now as great as at any time since the crisis erupted in late 2009.

Jean Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg Prime Minister who chaired Monday’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers, insisted, however, that other EU members were not seeking to push Greece out.

“Nobody was mentioning an exit of Greece from the euro area (in the ministerial meeting). I am strongly against,” Juncker told a news conference. “I don’t envisage, not even for one second, Greece leaving the euro area. This is nonsense. This is propaganda.”

Given that most Greeks say they want to keep the euro, European leaders are hoping they will return to mainstream politicians if there is a second election in June.

For that to happen, leaders in other European countries may have to take a gamble and intervene directly in the election campaign by making clear the vote will be in effect a referendum on staying in the eurozone.

“Without a Greek commitment this (bailout fund) won’t work, and this is the responsibility of Greek politicians,” Olli Rehn, the EU’s economics commissioner, said after the eurozone ministers’ meeting. “The future of Greece and the welfare of its citizens lie more than ever on the shoulders of Greek politicians.”

There is a risk that more foreign lecturing to the Greeks could backfire if voters rebel against yet more outside interference, but the EU is rapidly running out of options if it wants to keep the eurozone together.

The debate can be confusing, especially for Americans. Even as Merkel insists on cost cutting, her economic team rushes to explain that Germany has always been pro-growth. Well, maybe, but Merkel’s “growth” more likely means wasting Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and France. Hollande, a one-time professor of political economy, understands this as he preps for the grip of Madame Merkel’s open arms. He knows that she will try to smother him with her much-loved Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, which would press thorny sanctions on any country that fails to hold its deficits below 3 percent of gross domestic product. This fiscal compact, drawn up by Merkel and Hollande’s defeated predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, mandates harsh spending cuts that would further deflate the continent’s already weak economies, boost  unemployment, agitate unrest, reduce GDP and thereby increase everyone’s debts and deficits — including very likely her own.

Before the treaty becomes binding, though, it still has to be ratified by at least nine more nations, including Germany, where Merkel needs the support of the opposition Social Democrats to get the measure through parliament. Hollande, who is closely allied with them, has promised to block ratification unless Merkel agrees to more growth.

To date, she’s said OK to €10 billion in new funding for the European Investment Bank, greater pro-growth flexibility for the European Central Bank, possible delays for Spain, if not for Greece, on deficit reduction, maybe some Europe-wide money for infrastructure projects like roads and rails, and boosting wages for German workers even at the risk of slightly increasing domestic inflation. However, politically, Merkel’s “growth agenda” appears much too late. Right-wing extremists are already showing new muscle across Europe. Anti-austerity protesters have taken to the streets in Spain and walked out on strike in Britain. Her Christian Democratic Union took a routing in a second state election on Sunday, which gravely weakens Merkel in the run-up to next year’s national elections. Her political kindred lost elections in France and Greece. The latest polls from Athens predict that the left-wing anti-bailout Syriza coalition will win new elections in June if, as widely predicted, the pro-bailout politicians fail to form a governing coalition.

Economically, the German growth talk sounds far too limited and is simply wrong-headed. Taken all together, Merkel’s concessions would barely touch the anti-growth impact of the fiscal compact’s prescribed spending cuts. Does the lady really believe that suicide, personal or collective, is painless?

Growing Irish, Greek and Spanish rebellion has also thrown light on two of Europe’s dirty little secrets. Back in the 1990s, Germany was suffering badly from the huge costs of unifying East and West. The novel solution came with the invention of the European Union and the creation of the euro. German and other northern European banks began flooding the European periphery with low-interest loans. These paid for massive imports, mostly from German industry and much of it from the low-wage factories in the newly liberated Eastern Europe. (In Ireland, farmers chuckled over all the new EU sheep that so crowded the pastures that they fell into the sea.) The late British economist John Maynard Keynes, the bête noire of austerity mongers, could hardly have devised a better application of deficit spending.

Then came the downer. Much like U.S. mortgage creditors, the German and EU lenders knew that many of their borrowers could never pay back the loans without government intervention. They knew that the Greeks and others were hiding the extent of their indebtedness, often with help from U.S. investment banks and their deadly credit default swaps.  Far worse, German industrialists – like Siemens and Ferrostaal – paid bribes by the millions to highly receptive Greek officials. So much for German self-righteousness and Greek corruption.

Shorn of the shoddiness, European institutions today could easily provide a similar flow of life-saving funds to the faltering economies through a combination of printing money, borrowing, and raising taxes, which could include a Tobin tax on financial transactions. Given the low level of demand, any inflation would be minimal and could even prove beneficial. All of Europe would then grow, and the beneficiaries could pay down their deficits when times get better. Lord Keynes taught that as well, though it’s a lesson that too many of his would-be followers forget to follow.

As the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has explained too many times to count, “If Europe – particularly the European Central Bank – were to borrow, and relend the proceeds, the cost of servicing Europe’s debt would fall, creating room for the kinds of expenditure that would promote growth and employment.”

The Germans had no problem following the  Keynesian path when it served their  own interests, but now Madame Merkel insists:  “Growth on credit would throw us back to the start of the crisis and therefore we will not do that.” Do as we say, not as we did.

Compare Germany’s earlier credit-driven success to the bailout deal that Merkel, the IMF and the European Union imposed on the Greeks and you’ll discover the second dirty secret. No one – neither economists nor policy-makers – ever imagined that the required cuts, privatizations and fire sales of public treasures would allow the Greeks to dig themselves out of their ever-deepening hole. The bailout was never meant to help Greece. Its goal was primarily to buy time: first for the banks and other financial institutions that lent Greece money or hedged the loans; and then for the EU to gather funds to preempt a run on Italian, Spanish, Portuguese – and even French – banks should the Greeks finally abandon the euro (which many German officials now want them to do).

All this prickly platter comes along with Madame Merkel’s “open arms” when she welcomes Monsieur Hollande first on Tuesday in Berlin, and then again in the United States for G-8 and NATO summits later in the week, and it will bubble up at an informal EU summit in Brussels next week on May 23. Merkel hopes that Hollande will accept her concessions as sufficient and have France ratify the austerity-minded fiscal pact. Never a dunce, the French president is more likely to hold off on any firm commitment until next month’s French legislative elections, which his party expects to win.

What will he do then? Will he put his stamp of approval to Madame Merkel’s pro-growth talk? Or will “the red Socialist” as Americans like to characterize him, hold out for a serious growth pact that could bring Europe back into the black?  That will be the big test of what François Hollande is made of.

We’d chosen the apartment so we could be within walking distance of nearly everything. I’d overlooked its darkness and short ceilings for location’s sake: 15 minutes to Notre Dame; 25 to the Louvre.

Earlier generations of Americans wanted to live on the other side of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, where artists and students rambled, but the Left Bank had long ago priced out the artists and students. Now it was home to the rich of Paris, the wealthy of the retired-expat class, and Russian moguls, while the youthful and creative tended to live on the Right Bank, especially in the higher, cheaper numbers, the 19th or the 20th — if not the Right Bank of Berlin, or Toronto.

But we were very happy about our neighborhood, if not our quarters. Our apartment, located above a costume jewelry shop, was dismal and dark. The apartment above us was being renovated — I hadn’t heard the noises during my initial visit. So during our first days — we had a solid week before I was required at work — we tried to get out as much as possible.

Behind our street was a village of elbow streets, sunny walls and filthy corners, and many tucked-away shops. A ten-minute walk south was the proper Marais, the former Jewish quarter that had become a trendy shopping zone, but our northern district was still untrafficked. There were tailors and art galleries. Cafés and butchers. A store that sold athletic trophies and one that sold model trains. A blood-samples lab, a computer-repair agency, a video rental. On a leafy corner was a brightly lit lingerie-and-sex-toy boutique.

And where roads didn’t cross was an old covered market, the Marché du Temple, blue with a dirty glass roof. Some weekends, men trucked in what appeared to be stolen leather goods, but otherwise the market stood empty — Thursdays, maybe it was Tuesdays, a tennis league strung up nets inside — and the surrounding quadrant would be filled with people dawdling over café tables that they’d occupy for hours, chatting with friends. Then behind the market was Rue Bretagne, a picturesque street that wasn’t trendy yet. It would be soon, but not yet. Rue Bretagne had a park with a playground, two bookstores, a boutique that sold vintage radios, a booth that sold found photographs—it was the Left Bank I’d seen in picture books, preserved in time. At the center stood the oldest Paris farmer’s market still operating, Le Marché des Enfants Rouges, built in the 1600s, now ringed by food stalls that sold Moroccan tagines, huge piles of Turkish desserts, West African stews, even sushi.

It was fantastic.

Rachel and I tramped from dawn to late at night, and collapsed each evening. We also spent a lot of time having our pictures taken. Every service we signed up for in Paris — cell phones, Internet, electricity — required passport photos, with strict rules about their composure. On two separate occasions, we were asked to resubmit our photos; too much smiling. No visible happiness was allowed in official pictures — pas de sourire, visage dégagé.

To become Parisian was business très serieux.

Anyway, we set up home: Bought dishes, stocked the larder, purchased a mop and broom. We ate cheaply so we could afford a few good meals, including an expensive lunch one day inside the Musée d’Orsay, under rows of dazzling chandeliers, where we drank too much wine. Later we got caught in a rainstorm, running for shelter alongside the Seine. That week we must have seen … we saw a lot. But there were also errands to do.

For example, we visited a bank to open a checking account and apply for a credit card. Well, France didn’t have credit cards. Perhaps didn’t grasp them, conceptually — it wasn’t clear. The bank representative, who did not speak English, said I shouldn’t be bothered, that yes, our accounts included debit cards.

“No,” I said in French, “I apply for a card of credit.”

“This is what you have, a debit card,” she said.

“No. The debit card, it takes money, when I have money,” I said, going slowly to find the words. “I want a card that does not have a need for money.”

The banker rumbled it for a second. “Well,” she said, “we have an option where the card does not remove the money until the end of the month. Is that what you want?”

“No,” I said. “Something different.” I smiled cheerfully and tried again. “I want the card when I do not have money.”

“Maybe I do not understand,” she said. “What type of bank has cards like these?”

“American banks,” I said. “For example, if I want a computer for 2,000 euros, but I do not have 2,000 euros? I have a card. The card buys the computer. I give money to the card. Each month, a little money. Then: 2,000 euros.”

“Ah,” the banker said, pleased now, “you would like to arrange a loan!”

“Yes, but no,” I said. “I want a card. A card that gives a loan.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand, what kind of card again?” the clerk said.

“Its name is ‘credit card,’ ” I said.

The clerk looked at me closely to make sure this wasn’t all one big joke.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I do not think we have this in France.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

Toward the end of our first week, Rachel and I were sneezing, dizzy, exhausted, light-headed, almost fainting, lacking jet fuel, and coughing up sea-green mucus.

“The Paris Flu,” expats said. A persistent chest cold caused by French germs. “Everyone gets it,” I was told over a drink in Beaubourg, by an editor at the Herald Tribune, a friend of a friend. “Trick is,” he said, “you gotta eat the local honey. Go to that farmer’s market near you, Enfants Rouges. Introduce antibodies to your system from the Paris bees. Make sure you look for the sticker that says the bees are from Paris, that’s important.”

The next day, after a morning rain, there was a huff of good weather, and Rachel and I went out and purchased the honey of local bees. Then our stove broke. I was eating honey off a Kit Kat when the repairman rang the buzzer.

The repairman looked at our stove and drew squiggles on a ticket. He made to leave, so I handed the ticket back to him and attempted to explain that I couldn’t read his handwriting.

He wrote in block letters, CRÈME POUR LA PLAQUE.

So for lack of a creamy topping . . .

“The stove has plaque?” Rachel said from the doorway. She sniffled and went back into our living room, a cavern with dark beams.

I said quietly to the repairman, “Where do I find the cream for the plaque?”

But he’d already walked out. He was kind of a bastard.

In the hallway, he stopped in front of our neighbor’s door. There were buzz-saw sounds, and sawdust pouring in through an open window from the apartment upstairs. The repairman snatched the paper back from me and scrawled in carpenter pencil, “BHV,” then stomped downstairs, just avoiding a pregnant girl and her boyfriend.

“BHV,” I announced, closing the door. “What’s that?”

“Oh, the hardware store,” Rachel said, “near Hôtel de Ville. Bay-ash-vay. It’s the one with the lingerie section. I heard about it, I’ll take you later.”

- – - – - – - – - – -

Several letters arrived that week from the government. One said Rachel and I needed to be weighed, measured, and scanned for tuberculosis, immediately. Also, I’d be asked to pass a language test, since I’d be the one taking a job that could have gone to a French person.

Our appointment was the same day as the repairman’s visit. The health clinic was located near Place de la Bastille, not far away. We were in that paunch of Paris summer when the heat ballooned at one p.m., and the weather was lovely in a vehement way, glares everywhere.

At the clinic, Rachel and I were assigned to different waiting areas. After X-rays and measurements, I was directed to a language examiner’s office, for my French quiz.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I work in advertising.”

“What do you do in advertising?”

“I write.”

“What do you write?”

“I write for babies. Milk for babies.”

“Where are you from?”

“New York City.”

The examiner sat forward and said in English, “Wow, you are?” For five minutes she described to me how she was planning to visit Manhattan soon, it was a long-standing dream. “But isn’t it very dangerous?” she asked in English, her consonants sharp as thorns. “Do blacks and whites really get along?”

We stopped for a bite to eat on the way home, in a café on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. We ordered some white wine and frites, which came served with awful ketchup — and here I’d thought Heinz was universal.

“So,” Rachel said, “a lot of scientists have now seen me topless.”

“Oh, I know the feeling,” I said. I was holding my tuberculosis X-ray up to the window.

“Trust me, no, you don’t,” Rachel said.

She cinched her jacket, a green coat she’d bought especially for our move to France, and explained that things for women in Paris were quite different. “So the doctor is asking me questions. I have no idea what she’s saying. I think she tells me to remove my top. I’m pointing — This, my bra, she wants off? Yes, she wants off. Then I’m instructed to leave. Now that you’re topless, please go out that door. Only it’s a door for a closet with a yellow bulb inside, and at the other end there’s another door. I’m to go into the closet and wait for the other door to open.”

Rachel drank some wine. “So I’m asking myself, do I cover up, or go out full-frontal? Because I want to do it right. Do it the French way. What would Chloe do? I figured, probably a Frenchwoman would just walk out, you know, breasts on parade.”

“And?” I said.

“I went out French. The door opened, I checked my posture. It’s a big room, like an operating theater, with three male technicians. But they barely notice me. I’m like, You’re not even going to look? What does that say? Then I’m instructed to smoosh my chest against an upright X-ray machine, which was freezing, and they’re saying, Do it again, it’s not quite right. I mean, they’re wearing lab coats, but they’re also wearing jeans. How was I to know it wasn’t some crazy French reality TV show?”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Friday evening of the weekend before my first day at work, Pierre and Chloe invited us over for dinner. In the same room where I’d slept during my interview weekend, we drank tequila and listened to Charles Trenet and Wu-Tang Clan until about three a.m., when Pierre and Chloe’s downstairs neighbor complained about the noise.

Outside, the black sky combined Paris, summer, and the oncoming morning. Noises floated over our heads, but on Pierre and Chloe’s street it was quiet enough to hear the traffic signals buzzing. To get home, we rented Vélibs. These were the new bicycles that Paris had installed in a bikes-for-rent program. They’d become the latest badge of chic. Misty mornings, columns of riders pedaled beside the river, and pictures were everywhere of bare-legged women cycling around town in Chanel. Columnists filed reports on Vélib trends, Vélib crime especially — how the city’s bright young things rode Vélibs home after partying and crashed them into the Seine.

On the map, one street, the Boulevard de Magenta, appeared to run straight to our apartment. We looked down the hill, and there it was: four empty lanes plunging into blackness, flanked by gracefully decaying Haussmann slabs brambly with iron balconies. Rachel went first, her dress flapping in the wind. There was neon in her hair, then she was eaten up by the dark. I took off after her, 20 feet behind. Fifty feet behind. Soon she was gone. The boulevard flattened out, but for all my pedaling I was slowing down.

Rachel reappeared and found me gliding, kicking with my toes. The chain had come off my bicycle and was grinding on the road. There was no one around.

“We shouldn’t have had the tequila,” Rachel said, pedaling a circle around me.

“No, no,” I said, stopping, “not the tequila.”

We stood next to a bus stop and stared around. A Vélib stand was nearby. We parked the bikes and walked home. It was one of those moments when nothing could go wrong.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

The next morning I tried to take out the garbage, but the shed door wouldn’t budge. I yanked it, banged on it, was about to quit when Asif, the gardien, our building manager, whose rooms abutted the shed, rattled his shutters and yelled at me to shut up.

Asif came out, smoking. He wore an unbuttoned paisley shirt and blue jeans with embroidery on the seat. Asif appraised me and said something in French. I didn’t understand and attempted a retreat. That just pissed him off more. He whipped back his hair and snatched my trash, unlocked the shed, and tossed the bag inside.

His hair had the slow-motion buoyancy of a mermaid’s.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I do not have a key.”

“Give me your keys,” Asif snapped in French, with a destabilizing Pakistani accent. I could barely understand him. He was tall and lank, posing like a model. He pinched the neck of a four-inch key on my key ring and handed it back to me with two fingers, like a silver snake.

“You’re American?”

“From New York,” I said. “My wife,” I said, pointing at our bedroom window, just above his head.

“I love New York,” Asif said. “I’m going soon. You’ll tell me where your family lives?”

He pulled me inside his rooms. They smelled of sex. A cute brunette in a bathrobe was sautéeing peppers and chicken. She smiled at me. Asif downed some whiskey from a glass on top of a trash can, and poured us shots. We did a toast to New York City. He gripped my arms, beaming. When I explained I needed to go run errands (faire les courses), Asif went slack. “Fine, then leave!” he shouted, frowning, and disappeared into the bedroom.

Over time, I’d learn that Asif gained and lost euphoria faster than anyone I’d ever met.

That same morning, Rachel and I walked down to BHV, the home-and-hardware store with a lingerie section — it also had a jewelry section, and cabinets of designer handbags, and a lumberyard in the basement, and a kitchen-items section with space for cooking classes — where we bought cream for our stove. Turns out the cream worked. Our coils didn’t conduct electricity when they lacked moisturizer; apparently they’d gone dairy-free too long. And the same day, just when we couldn’t face one more spoonful of honey, our flu vanished.

We lived in Paris, Paris being not only the city of milk and honey, but also the city where milk and honey were solutions.

No one wonders, because who needs to ask?

That afternoon, we walked halfway across the city and rode a bus home, and collapsed in bed. Lying there on top of the comforter, staring at the dark beams crossing the white plaster ceiling, suddenly I was anxious and out of breath, overpowered by homesickness.

I wanted out of that apartment, out of Paris, as fast as possible.

Rachel said something into her pillow about being hungry. Ice cream, I said, I’ll go get ice cream.

I don’t even like ice cream that much.

I ran outside, le monde à mes pieds, to Place de la République, the large traffic circle behind our apartment. République was a racetrack with four lanes of vehicles whipping around two parks. No square in America looked so majestic, yet in Paris République was considered a retail zone — hardly special except for being where protesters gathered whenever the government threatened to raise the retirement age. In the center was a statue of a robed woman. She was Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, proud and tall, perhaps unaware that her robe was slipping. In several ways, she reminded me of Mireille. I stood on an island in the middle of the Boulevard Saint-Martin, which flowed into République, and waited through several traffic lights, just watching. New, new, new, I was thinking. Our previous life would be reversed within 24 hours: Me working in an office, in a language I barely spoke, and Rachel at home writing when she wasn’t attending French lessons. Was this a good idea? Was it the right thing to do?

It seemed like a colossal mistake.

But would I really prefer to be anywhere else? Hadn’t Rachel’s breasts passed inspection by Parisian experts? As long as no one talked to me about topics other than New York, wouldn’t I be fine?

I was scared. Well, so what?

I got the ice cream. We ate it in bed. Through the windows came fragrances from the trees outside and Asif ’s vegetable garden. We heard only birdsong. I remembered a letter Edith Wharton wrote about Paris in 1907 that I’d seen excerpted in a magazine back in the States: “The tranquil majesty of the architectural lines, the wonderful blurred winter lights, the long lines of lamps garlanding the avenues & the quays — je l’ai dans mon sang!” (“I have it in my blood!”)

At the time, I’d thought I knew what she meant. But now I knew.

Excerpted from “Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” by Rosecrans Baldwin, published in May 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2012 by Rosecrans Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Cameron, whose own economic policies have worsened the daily grind dragging down most Brits, may be sobered by what happened over the weekend in France and Greece – as well as his own poll numbers. Britain’s conservatives have been taking a beating.

In truth, the choice isn’t simply between budget-cutting austerity, on the one hand, and growth and jobs on the other.

It’s really a question of timing. And it’s the same issue on this side of the pond. If government slices spending too early, when unemployment is high and growth is slowing, it makes the debt situation far worse.

That’s because public spending is a critical component of total demand. If demand is already lagging, spending cuts further slow the economy – and thereby increase the size of the public debt relative to the size of the overall economy.

You end up with the worst of both worlds – a growing ratio of debt to the gross domestic product, coupled with high unemployment and a public that’s furious about losing safety nets when they’re most needed.

The proper sequence is for government to keep spending until jobs and growth are restored, and only then to take out the budget axe.

If Hollande’s new government pushes Angela Merkel in this direction, he’ll end up saving the euro and, ironically, the jobs of many conservative leaders throughout Europe – including Merkel and Cameron.

But he also has an important audience in the United States, where Republicans are trying to sell a toxic blend of trickle-down supply-side economics (tax cuts on the rich and on corporations) and austerity for everyone else (government spending cuts). That’s exactly the opposite of what’s needed now.

Yes, America has a long-term budget deficit that’s scary. So does Europe. But the first priority in America and in Europe must be growth and jobs. That means rejecting austerity economics for now, while at the same time demanding that corporations and the rich pay their fair share of the cost of keeping everyone else afloat.

President Obama and the Democrats should set a clear trigger — say, 6 percent unemployment and two quarters of growth greater than 3 percent — before whacking the budget deficit.

And they should set that trigger now, during the election, so the public can give them a mandate on Election Day to delay the “sequestration” cuts (now scheduled to begin next year) until that trigger is met.

Le Pen, the “right-wing liberal” Wilders and the unbelievably weird Breivik differ in crucial ways, but they reflect the range and varied thrust of Europe’s far right, which is showing its greatest strength since World War II. All three have given up yesterday’s Jew-baiting, at least in public, and proudly proclaim their support of Israel. They all target Muslims as a major source of Europe’s current woes, preaching a white European nationalism that is largely Christian and intolerant of immigrants and other outsiders. And they all feed on a popular backlash against the European Union and Eurozone and the failure of mainstream leaders to provide any sense of hope at a time of crippling economic crisis.

“Vive Hitler”

Far and away the most important, Marine Le Pen often appears as little more than a right-wing populist seeking protest votes. But this ignores who she is, where she comes from and why she has never disavowed her father’s pro-Nazi past. “It’s the same politics of scapegoating that it always has been,” explains Professor Nonna Mayer, an expert on the French far right at the prestigious Paris Institute for Political Studies, or Sciences Po. “There’s no getting away from it.”

Crafty, charismatic and shamelessly provocative, her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is a former paratrooper and intelligence officer whose unit brutally tortured and killed “Arab terrorists” in Algeria. He created the National Front in 1972, bringing together self-proclaimed fascists, Vichy collaborators, well-known war criminals and more traditional right-wing Catholics. He publicly dismissed the Holocaust as “a mere detail in the history of the Second World War.” He publicly made puns about the Nazi gas ovens. He accused former president Jacques Chirac of being “in the pay of Jewish organizations,” and this February a French appeals court upheld his conviction for denying crimes against humanity when he said that the Nazi occupation of France “was not especially inhumane.” But as far back as his historic 2002 campaign against Chirac, he downplayed his signature anti-Semitism and directed his hatred primarily at Muslims, whom he accused of taking French jobs, threatening French culture and polluting the national identity. “Tomorrow, if you don’t watch out,” he warned, “they will take your home, eat your food and sleep with your wife, your daughter, or your son.”

One overlooked nugget from his past throws unexpected light on what his youngest daughter is now trying to do. In the late 1960s, the elder Le Pen ran a record company that produced “The Third Reich: Voices and Songs of the German Revolution.” The album included such old favorites as “Vive Hitler” and “The Hymn of the Nazi Party.” On the record jacket, Le Pen characterized Hitler and the National Socialists in their rise to power as “a powerful mass movement, altogether popular and democratic, that triumphed through elections.”

Marine shows how this might work today. Trying to remove the historic stigma from the National Front, she has presented herself as a wholesome girl next door become modern-day Joan of Arc. “I am not racist, not anti-Semitic, not xenophobic, but patriotic,” she insists. “Our party is not based on hate toward others, but on love for our own country.” She also dismissed the label “extreme right” and describes herself as a “moderate.” A lawyer with professional self-discipline, she has avoided Jean-Marie’s racist and anti-Semitic remarks, which she rightly sees as inflammatory and counter-productive. She has worked, not always successfully, to tone down her bodyguards and their bully-boy tactics. And she has made a knowledgeable attack on neoliberal economics and finance-dominated capitalism, which many voters found more credible than Hollande’s badly compromised social democratic critique or Jean-Luc Melénchon’s far-left update of Karl Marx.

Still, Marine follows Jean-Marie’s lead. She regularly attacks Muslims and made a huge uproar when a state-owned restaurant chain announced that eight of its outlets would offer exclusively halal meals. Distinguishing herself from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she insists that she is “not waging war against Islam,” but only against “the Islamization of French Society,” the phrase Jean-Marie used in his 2002 run for president.

All this picked up in March, after the killing of three French paratroopers, a rabbi and three Jewish schoolchildren in and around Toulouse. The alleged and apparently self-admitted killer, Mohamed Merah, was a French Muslim, and Marine wasted no time in escalating a string of blistering attacks against “radical Islam” and the laxity of Sarkozy’s government in allowing Muslim neighborhoods to fall into “the hands of bullies and fanatical imams.” Sarkozy himself gave legitimacy to her Muslim-bashing, shamelessly competing with her for the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim vote and further helping the National Front gain acceptance as a respectable part of French politics.

Now, in the May 6 presidential run-off, she seems unlikely to endorse either Sarkozy or Hollande. The only question is whether she will encourage her voters to abstain, which if they do will guarantee defeat for Sarkozy and his UMP, the Union for a Popular Majority. Her goal, openly discussed, is to win several seats in June’s parliamentary elections and join forces with right-wing UMP defectors in a “Blue Marine Rally” to become leader of the country’s conservative opposition. This will be no easy task, but don’t underestimate her drive or determination. She is, after all, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, only more effective and, in our opinion, more dangerous.

Kicking Over the Table

Geert Wilders knows how to make people angry, and rarely more so than last week when he suddenly walked out of talks to cut the Dutch budget deficit to 3 percent, in line with longstanding and often ignored European Union requirements. His Freedom Party holds 23 seats in the lower house of parliament and his refusal to continue supporting the governing right-wing coalition forced the government to resign and schedule new elections for September. A caretaker government has just announced a new austerity budget deal without Wilders, but any further uncertainty could cause the country to lose its highly prized AAA rating on government bonds. No wonder backers of the customary Dutch consensus are railing so loudly against him for “kicking over the table.”

Wilders first gained notoriety – and support – with his abrasive attacks on Islam, which he sums up in a new book, “Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me.” He generally steers clear of Le Pen’s National Front and other right-wing groups with fascist roots, but has been no less militant in his passion against immigrants and Islam. He called on his fellow citizens to stop the building of new mosques, to prevent Muslim women from wearing full-face veils and to ban sales of the Koran, which he compared to Mein Kampf. Speaking in New York on Sept. 11, 2010, he condemned plans to build the Park 51 Islamic mosque and cultural center two blocks from ground zero, a project that the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had stuck out his neck to defend in the name of tolerance.

“Mayor Bloomberg forgets that openness cannot be open-ended,” Wilders countered. “A tolerant society is not a suicidal society. It must defend itself against the powers of darkness, the force of hatred and the blight of ignorance. It cannot tolerate the intolerant – and survive.” Or, as the French Revolution’s Louis de Saint-Just defended the Great Terror and its guillotine, “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.”

But Islam and immigration have never been Wilders’s only issues. A longtime Eurosceptic, he helped defeat the proposed European Constitution in the 2005 referendum and has talked about the advantages of leaving the Euro. Now he goes even further, risking his political career with an all-out attack. The polls say he will lose seats in the next election, which he will make a referendum on Europe, “unelected Eurocrats” and “the diktats of Brussels.” Given the continuing failure of European leaders to deal effectively with either the economic crisis or the growing backlash against their largely undemocratic institutions, don’t bet against him.

Deconstructing Breivik

Whatever the court in Oslo rules on the sanity of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, he is not wired like the rest of us. Prosecutors have skillfully forced him to admit that he has greatly embellished with “pompous language” all his talk of his Knights Templar secret society, covert cells of superbly trained Christian warriors and the 1,500-page compendium he called a European Declaration of independence. “So if you take away all the pompousness, what are you left with?” asked the soft-spoken government attorney Inga Bejer Engh. “You basically sat in your bedroom, on your own, and you copy-pasted your so-called compendium from the Internet.” Breivik had gotten the platform he so desperately wanted and he stood revealed as a failed businessman, a fraud, a video addict and, in the devastating headline of London’s Sunday Times, a “Loser Who Lived with His Mum.”

The deconstruction of Breivik brilliantly serves the needs of the Norwegian court, which can now find him criminally culpable without giving any credence to his claims. It also soothes the feelings of those who lost their loved ones or survived the nightmare he created with his car bomb in Oslo and his killing spree on Utoya Island. But the courtroom drama obscures a larger truth. Breivik may be living out a fantasy, but many far-right Europeans share the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-elite views he expressed.

The newly respectable Marine Le Pen makes this clear. She immediately issued a statement saying that “The National Front condemns these barbarian and cowardly acts and expresses its total solidarity with the people of Norway.” But she continues to argue that “fear of a crazy man” will not stop her from fighting against the Islamic fundamentalism, Sharia law and the Islamization of France. Her father went even further, blaming the killings on Norway’s failure to understand the danger that wide-scale immigration poses to the world. As he said at the time with undiplomatic directness, “The murderous consequences seem to me much more linked to the naivety of the Norwegian state than the madness of this crazy person.”

For all their differences, the Le Pens, Wilders and even Breivik are all singing from the same hymn book, as Europe’s far right marches on.

* Research for this article was funded in part by One Horizon.