On a day when Greece called for new elections, with serious implications for the European economy and the future of the euro, the other country with elections on May 6 swore in their new President. Francois Hollande came to power in France calling for a return to growth rather than a single-minded focus on debt reduction and austerity in Europe. He called his program a new pact

Having seen anti-austerity votes take place in France, Italy, the UK, and Greece it is noteworthy that the voters rebellion has spread to the intellectual “fatherland” of austerity, Germany.

Germany’s Angela Merkel dismissed newly elected French President Francois Hollande’s call to renegotiate the European fiscal pact to include growth measures rather than merely budget constraints. But as more Euro governments face electoral opposition to austerity, Merkel’s position will become increasingly untenable.

At this moment, politics in Europe is both more interesting and consequential than politics in the US. A case in point: newly-elected Francois Hollande just threw down the gauntlet with Germany, offering his ultimatum to Chancellor Angela Merkel on the future for Euro-zone financing.

This a.m. Atrios highlights an op ed at the Financial Times by Wolfgang Münchau pointing out that Greece now faces the bitter choice of defaulting if it wants to preserve any pretense of democracy and national sovereignty. That follows a week or more of intimidating and insulting comments by German financial minister Wolfgang Schäuble and others

After all their self-defeating austerity efforts, a few European economic policy makers are noticing that they’re having a problem with growth. The UK and other economies are falling back into recession; Greece is in a depression. But they still haven’t acknowledged they’ve got the solutions backwards.

There is much to say about this week’s Frontline documentary, “Nuclear Aftershocks,” and some of it would even be good. For the casual follower of nuclear news in the ten months since an earthquake and tsunami triggered the massive and ongoing disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, it is illuminating to see the wreckage that once was a trio of active nuclear reactors, and the devastation and desolation that has replaced town after town inside the 20-kilometer evacuation zone. And it is eye-opening to experience at ground level the inadequacy of the Indian Point nuclear plant evacuation plan. It is also helpful to learn that citizens in Japan and Germany have seen enough and are demanding their countries phase out nuclear energy.

But if you are only a casual observer of this particular segment of the news, then the Frontline broadcast also left you with a mountain of misinformation and big bowl-full of unquestioned bias.

When Standard and Poor’s downgraded nine European countries last Friday, they said plainly that European leaders were blinding themselves to the full crisis, ignoring the trade imbalances between core and peripheral Euro nations. But Germany’s Merkel doubled down on austerity, which has created a depression in Greece, with huge risks of default.

You Just Can’t Find Good Help These Days.

Not only were members of Greenpeace able to get past the security guarding at least one, and possibly three, nuclear facilities in France, they were able to plan and execute this operation less than a month after the plant operator, French energy giant EDF, was fined 1.5 million Euros ($2 million) for hacking into Greenpeace computers.

France and Germany have reached agreement on a fiscal plan for Europe that has everything to do with veto power for the European Commission over sovereign budgets and very little to do with the long-term problem of smoothing growth over 17 different countries operating under one monetary union.