After four years of economic stress, European voters are every bit as fed up as their American counterparts, and they've settled on a time-tested solution: Throw the bums out.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is the latest and most prominent victim, rejected in an election Sunday. He joins a list of defeated leaders that reaches across the continent ― a disturbing omen for President Obama and incumbents generally, but from an American perspective one with a twist: Almost uniformly, the Europeans are punishing center-right parties for austerity programs similar to those favored by Republicans here.

In France, socialist Francois Hollande was elected by promising to add government jobs, raise taxes on the rich to 75 percent, and ease the stringent austerity imposed on European governments by Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to address the global financial crisis.

Greeks, who also voted Sunday, carried the rejectionist theme even further. They spurned not only the center-right governing party but also the socialist party with which it has traded power since democracy was restored four decades ago ― the equivalent of Americans repudiating both Democrats and Republicans. Not a bad idea, in theory. But the Greeks scattered their votes among an assortment of fringe parties, effectively leaving no one in power.

The message is pretty simple. People don't know what they want, but they know they don't like what they're getting, which in Greece ― deep in debt and unable to borrow more without help ― is 21.8 percent unemployment, rising taxes, fewer services and lots of anger.

Solutions, particularly quick ones, are elusive.

Hollande, like other recent winners, proposes "growth" as an alternative to austerity. And who wouldn't be for that swap?

But hiring more government workers and retaining a retirement age of 60 (both promises central to Hollande's popularity) won't grow anything but debt. Sarkozy's approach, on the other hand, might achieve fiscal balance in the long run, but austerity has sent several European economies into recession, deepening their problems instead of easing them.

And therein lies the problem on both sides of the Atlantic.

Massive long-term forces ― global competition, aging populations and excessive debt ― are dictating choices that neither voters nor the politicians who cater to them want to make.

The Europeans will now feel pressed toward more U.S.-style economic stimulus, which makes short-term sense. But economically and politically, the problems are so daunting that one election won't solve them. The real choices, and the greatest dangers, remain ahead.

This article was published and distributed by USA Today.