The austerity coalition lost a strong supporter this week, with the collapse of Mark Rutte's government in the Netherlands. Last month, junior partner Slovakia stepped out after a Socialist election victory. Germany is left with Finland (and tiny Slovenia) on its shrinking team.
On the other side, the deterioration in the eurozone economy has provided ammunition for those arguing that a shift in course is needed. The dissidents have also found a voice with the replacement in November of Silvio Berlusconi by Mario Monti as Italian prime minister. Mr Monti, a respected economist, can lecture his counterparts about the drawbacks of a diet of austerity without being suspected, as his predecessor was, of shirking on his commitments.
Election after election over the past 15 months has thrown out incumbents. In France, next month socialist François Hollande is favoured to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy in the Élysée Palace. On key decisions, Mr Sarkozy has usually followed the line of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
The big question though is whether this change in tone will lead to a fundamental change in eurozone policy. And there are a lot of reasons to suggest it won't, or, if it does, only very slowly.
In the first place, how would policy change? In a speech in Brussels on Thursday, Mr Monti emphasised that the current prescription—budget cuts with structural reforms aimed at easing the way for more jobs and investment—"will never deliver growth".
"All the reforms that we are putting in place are not creating growth, they are deflationary", he said, adding "we need demand to be there". He said he wasn't proposing "old-style Keynesian" deficit spending that would provide an "ephemeral" spur to demand, but instead an increase of "private, private-public or just public" investment, for example, in infrastructure.
It isn't clear how this would occur in practice. Germany may be losing allies but it remains the eurozone's political and economic hegemon. Growth rhetoric aside, Ms Merkel has shown no sign she intends to shift the current course.
Beyond that, German policy has already hard-wired austerity into the eurozone structures and into legislation across the bloc in changes introduced since the debt crisis's onset. Slovakia and the Netherlands may change governments but their pledges to keep to the new budget rules remain.
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