Looking back, one the most significant events of our 2012 presidential campaign may be the French elections last weekend, in which Socialist Francois Hollande ousted President Nicolas Sarkozy. It was the left’s first presidential victory since 1988, and it was also the first time since 1981 a French president was denied re-election.

Don’t look for a return of socialism, or anything like it, in France, though Hollande did say he wanted the top income tax rate to go to 75 percent — far beyond the worst nightmares of America’s 1 percent.

The French election, with similarly sweeping results in local elections in Britain and Germany, was not about ideology at all. It was about policy. Europe, under Germany’s direction, with Sarkozy’s assistance, embarked on a program of austerity ever since the first, false signs of recovery in 2010, a policy that has now utterly failed.

Republicans in Congress who insist that the only way out of America’s long-running malaise is to cut federal spending – proposed new tax breaks for billionaires are only window-dressing – have seen a rehearsal of exactly that kind of policy across the European continent.

Voters in France, Britain and Germany weren’t voting against austerity because it included painful cuts to education and health care; they were willing to bear the pain because that’s what their elected leaders told them would revive the economy. But it hasn’t.

Europe is sinking back into recession even as the United States is slowly, painfully, adding jobs – 4.2 million in the private sector since 2009, against losses of 600,000 jobs in federal, state and local governments. Britain’s numbers officially turned to recession last week, though the downward trend has been unmistakable.

In country after country that’s tried “fiscal discipline” – Spain, Ireland, Greece – growth has imploded and unemployment soared. Unemployment is over 20% in Ireland – Great Depression levels.

The results, despite all the smart people who supported austerity, were completely predictable. We’ve been here before. The Great Depression itself went on and on until, finally, the previously unheard-of federal spending binge that went with fighting World War II brought it to an end.

Yes, deficits rise during an ordinary recession, let alone the financial implosion the world experienced in 2008. Tax revenue goes down, and spending goes up – for unemployment insurance and other government benefits, including food assistance – that aid people who would otherwise face destitution.

But the time to cut spending and raise taxes is not then, but when the economy has begun to grow steadily and unemployment decreases significantly. The U.S. jobless rate’s decline from its peak has been less than 2 percent — not sufficient to start putting on the brakes.

President Obama has wisely resisted the turn toward austerity, though if he loses in November, Mitt Romney has pledged to employ austerity on a scale not yet seen anywhere. It, too, would fail – spectacularly – which is the real reason we should focus not only on where the economy has been, but where it’s going.

There is no evidence – none – that austerity will work here any better than in Europe. And that would be the ultimate irony – turning out a president because of a subpar economy, only to elect one who would make sure things got worse. Instead, a modest program of support for state and local governments and direct investment in infrastructure – roads, rails, digital communication, innovative schools – could get the economy going quickly, now that it’s at least in positive territory. That seems to be Obama’s plan for a second term.

This is not about ideology. This is about what works. And we know what works, based on decades of experience with recessions and depressions.

A small-scale version of austerity is now being played out at the State House. Gov. Paul LePage has brought back all the unwise health care cuts the Legislature rejected earlier, only this time to have Republicans support him on a party-line vote, aiming toward a majority budget rather than the usual two-thirds — something they may come to regret. GOP negotiators haven’t accepted all the cuts, but they’ve embraced a lot of them, even though there’s now sufficient revenue to avoid them.

LePage calls removing health care benefits, paid mostly with federal funds, “structural reform,” but that’s not how it will look to the thousands of working people who will no longer be able to see a doctor, or the retirees who can no longer afford their prescriptions. It will just look like pain to them.

They will be right. And it won’t heal the state economy, either.