Austerity Faces Sharper Debate After European Elections

After elections in France and Greek punished leaders advocating austerity, Europeans on Monday contemplated a new and untested political landscape shaped by competing demands for austerity on one hand to counter the debt crisis and growth on the other to avert further deprivation

With final results of the French presidential election announced on Monday, the socialist challenger,Francois Hollande had secured 51.62 percent of the runoff vote, defeating Nicolas Sarkozy as polls had foreshadowed.

In broad terms, the French vote unsettled center-right governments across Europe, while their center-left adversaries felt emboldened, hoping that the triumph of one socialist leader presaged a wider resurgence.

But the real nub of the ideological and fiscal contest lay in the continent’s traditional driving axis between Berlin and Paris, with Mr. Hollande promising to rewrite the austerity-driven pact struck between Mr. Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Markel of Germany , whose own electoral fortunes are also uncertain.

Mrs. Merkel telephoned Mr. Hollande on Sunday night, shortly after his victory to congratulate him, Steffen Seibert, her spokesman, said.

“The two agree  the importance of close German-French relations and have assured one another that they will strive toward good and trusting cooperation,” Mr. Seibert said in a statement Sunday night. The chancellor invited Mr. Hollande to come to Berlin “as soon as possible after his inauguration,” he said.

News of Mr. Hollande’s election was splashed across the front pages of Germany’s newspapers, with photos of the smiling victor. But, in an editorial, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said that, after the champagne corks had finished popping it would be “adieu campaign, bonjour reality. And it is a bitter reality.”

Mrs. Merkel’s political opponents, though, seemed cheered. Sigmar Gabriel, head of the opposition Social Democrats, said on Monday that the result in France showed that “the politics of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy led Europe deeper into crisis.”

The victory for Mr. Hollande will “not only change France, but finally help Europe to go in another direction,” he said.

In effect, Mr. Hollande’s commitment to negotiating a new pact for the battered euro zone seemed to challenge Mrs. Merkel’s dominance of the debate, projecting France as the vaunted champion of a wider movement of people no longer prepared to go along with threats to cherished living standards.

“Austerity need not be Europe’s fate,” Mr. Hollande declared after his victory was announced.

“You are much more than a people who want change,” Mr. Hollande told a huge crowd in Paris gathered to celebrate his victory at the Place de la Bastille, according to news reports. “You are already a movement that is rising across all of Europe and maybe the world.”

In a first signal from Berlin that Germany was prepared for some form of compromise, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said late Sunday: “We will now work together on a growth pact for Europe that delivers more growth through more competitiveness.”

The combative new mood in France and the electoral rise of extreme challengers to the traditional titans of Greek politics in Athens left markets unsettled, with the euro at its lowest against the dollar for months. Stock markets in Asia and Europe stumbled.

In Greece, the two political mainstays, New Democracy to the center-right and the socialist Pasok, secured only about a third of the ballot between them as voters deserted them in favor of extreme parties, according to near-complete results on Monday, leaving Greece facing deep political uncertainty.

In televised remarks, the socialist leader, Evangelos Venizelos, said on Sunday night that Mr. Hollande’s victory would shift the "balance" in Europe. Mr. Venizelos’s political legitimacy has collapsed under the weight of austerity measures that have pushed Greece deep into recession, and his remarks seemed aimed at sending a message that Europe needed to rethink its program for Greece.

His party suffered its worst showing since its founding in 1974 on Sunday, placing third after New Democracy, the center-right front-runner, which also backed the bailout, and the Coalition of the Radical Left, called Syriza, which opposed it. The far-right Golden Dawn group, whose members routinely perform Nazi salutes, won 7 percent as angry voters turned to fringe parties to punish the mainstream.