THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

First, the IMF decides that austerity is a bad idea. Then the intellectual basis for austerity is thoroughly and completely discredited. And now the symptoms of depression are encroaching on the still functioning economies of Europe that were meant to benefit from austerity. So the European Union has to decide whether to push on with their failure or come to their senses and reverse course.

After years of insisting that the primary cure for Europe’s malaise is to slash spending, the champions of austerity, most notably Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, find themselves under intensified pressure to back off unpopular remedies and find some way to restore faltering growth to the world’s largest economic bloc.

On Friday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain, who once promoted aggressive budget cuts, became the latest leader to reject European Union targets for reducing deficits.

That is one of several developments — a recent court ruling against job cuts in Portugal; a new, austerity-averse prime-minister-in-waiting in Italy; and mounting doubts among ordinary Europeans and even the International Monetary Fund — that have forced senior officials in Brussels to acknowledge that a move away from what critics see as a fixation on debt and deficits toward more growth-friendly policies is necessary.

“There has been a clear shift in thinking,” said Guntram Wolff, a German economist who has worked at the European Commission, the union’s policy-making arm, and is now acting director of Bruegel, a Brussels research group.

The flurry of activity comes after an influential academic paper embraced by austerity advocates as evidence that even recessionary economies should cut spending to avoid high debt levels, written by the Harvard scholars Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, has come under attack for errors that opponents of austerity say helped lead European policy makers astray.

Europe is not about to throw open the spending spigots in the 27 nations of the European Union, even as the bloc teeters on the edge of a new regionwide recession. But officials are clearly shifting toward what Leonardo Domenici, an Italian member of the European Parliament, described as “austerity with a human face.”

Even Ms. Merkel has tried of late to soften her image as the unbending deficit scold of Europe. Asked at a forum in Berlin this week whether the “screw of austerity” had been turned too tight, she complained that what used to be “called saving or consolidation or balanced budgets” is “now called austerity,” adding that this “really sounds like something completely evil.”

They will most certainly try to put as much lipstick as possible on the pig because to admit the pig is dead would be admitting their own grievous failure. And people in power never admit failure.