Spain’s drastic belt-tightening has moved government accounts in the right direction for the first time since the European financial crisis erupted last year. But in so doing, it has braked the economy into recession, accelerating a wave of firings and darkening the horizon for millions of workers.

In most of the 17 countries using the E.U. common currency, the euro, this has become the no-win choice leaders have had to make: balance budgets but forsake growth and jobs. Although they regularly promise to stimulate their economies — particularly France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who faces elections in the spring — the deep spending cuts required to carve down deficits and public debts have, in fact, strangled economic activity.

With the exception of Germany, zero growth or even recession has been predicted across most of the continent for the rest of the year and perhaps beyond. As a result, tax receipts needed to finance government action are declining and, in the saddest human toll, unemployment has risen to new heights.

Rajoy warned last week that unemployment in Spain — already Europe’s highest at nearly 23 percent — is likely to climb still higher before the year is out. The prospect for young people, those 24 and younger, among whom unemployment has reached 46 percent, is particularly bleak.

“This year is going to be bad,” Rajoy told Parliament. “We have to say so to the Spanish people.”

That was unwelcome but not unexpected news for Carlos Burillo as he marched around Madrid’s Liberty Square on a cold winter evening in a subdued demonstration by labor unions. The 33-year-old physical education teacher found an interim job in a junior high school for this term, but as of September he faces a new round of unemployment unless he can find someplace that is hiring.

“This crisis is all over Europe,” he said. “We hope it only lasts for three years or so.”

Unemployed at 59

One of those unemployed people, Martin, spends a lot of time walking. He said he walks to and fro in Madrid’s gritty Vallecas neighborhood, walking to go nowhere, walking just to pass the time of day.

There is a daily one-hour computer course organized by the Madrid unemployment office, he said, averting his gaze and declining to give his family name for publication. But for the rest of the time, walking is all he has to do.

Martin, 59, was not always a walker. During Spain’s boom years, he was a construction worker who specialized in taking topography readings for the new roads and streets that were being laid everywhere at the time. Then two years ago, it all went bust. The suburban housing developments went broke. The company he worked for had no more projects.