It’s official: Greece will hold new elections after the various parties could not work out an agreement on a government after the Parliamentary vote on May 6. President Karolos Papoulias made the news today in a statement. The new elections should be held in mid-June.

Over the weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown announced that the budget deficit for the next fiscal year has nearly doubled, from $9.2 billion to $16 billion. This almost assuredly means a commensurate increase in cuts to the state budget.

We’ll probably get the final word today, but I think it’s safe to say there will not be a Greek government forming out of the most recent elections. After the top three vote-getting parties each tried and failed to form a government, the Greek President made one last plea to amass a government of national unity among a clatch of parties. However, The Radical Coalition of the Left, or Syriza, never attended the talks.

We’re still in the posturing phase of the fiscal cliff situation, and now we have another data point. Harry Reid has come out and said pretty forcefully that he will not roll back the trigger, the automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending due at the end of the year, without a “balanced” approach to replace them.

The third-place party in the Greek elections, PASOK, has been given the opportunity to form a new government, after the first two parties failed in their efforts. Nobody expects PASOK to be successful, meaning that new elections will ensue, probably on June 17. By that time, decisions will need to be made on bailouts and budget cuts, and there will be no government in place to do it. This puts the bailout plan in significant peril, as well as Greece’s place in the eurozone.

The Greek public simply could not accept the forced depression they were being pushed into by their bailout masters, and the elections showed clearly that was over. So now the Germans are trying to talk themselves into the idea that Greece could exit the eurozone with no repercussions (for 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.

If the Washington Post doesn’t like the results, then an election must be “shrill.” That would explain the lead sentence of its lead front page story on the elections in France and Greece on Sunday. As with most WaPo articles on economics, this one is full of misconceptions and factual errors.

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.

Over those two weeks, the Spanish government definitively announced that they had slipped back into recession. They said that 5.6 million of their citizens were out of work, a number that represents nearly 1/4 of the labor force. Among the young, the jobless are a majority. As a tourist, it’s actually quite easy to go through your travels without a deep awareness of any of this. But a closer look begins to reveal the signs of a nation losing hope.