PARIS, France (PNN) - April 29, 2013 - With economic growth stuck near zero and unemployment rising, Europeans are increasingly impatient with the budget discipline imposed as part of the European Union’s showcase anti-crisis pact.

In France, the doubts have spread to President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party and government, with officials suggesting that the debt-ridden continent needs to stimulate growth at all costs - even including more debt - if it is to climb out of the economic and financial crisis that began unfurling in 2008.

But conservatives, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the lead, have objected that abandoning the efforts to pare back deficits could lead to renewed pressure on the euro, the European Union’s common currency, and revive the sense of impending disaster that gripped the continent two years ago. Interest rates have stayed low for the past six months, they warn, but that could change quickly, with uncontrollable consequences for heavily indebted governments.

The budget strictures have contributed to stagnation or even a decline in growth in most of Europe’s major economies, hitting politicians hard when they return home to face their constituents and reinforcing their doubts. France will finish this year with 0.1% growth, EU economists have forecast, and Italy with minus 1%. Germany, they said, will be the exception, with 0.5% growth.

As a result, unemployment has soared in key economies, and according to EU economists, there is little hope for a significant recovery before 2015. France’s unemployment rate has hit nearly 11% - which was already the rate in Italy - while Spain’s recently rose above 27%. Again, Germany is the exception, with an unemployment rate a little over 5%, giving Merkel a sound platform for her preaching on budget restraint.

“Italy is dying because of austerity alone,” that country’s new prime minister, Enrico Letta, complained in his first address to Parliament on Monday. “Stimulus policies can no longer wait.”

France is not alone in failing to meet the targets. For instance last week, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain got a two-year extension, to 2016, and has prepared a budget with a deficit of 6.3% of GDP. The worst-off countries - Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus - have little hope of meeting the requirement but are virtually assured of getting a bye from Brussels.