But here’s where Europe’s brand of gridlock turns out to be even worse than ours. Merkel says she will launch a new “More Europe” banking union, in exchange for economic reforms in other countries, as soon as she’s reelected on Sept. 22. In Germany, just as in Washington, you can enact politically risky reforms only in the brief windows that open just after an election campaign.

But in the Eurozone, those windows are even smaller. With 28 members, somebody in the EU is always in campaign mode.

Next up in 2014 is France, which will vote for the European Parliament in May and its own Senate in September. “Hollande won’t agree to major reforms before then, and that means Merkel can’t do anything big,” French political scientist Patrick Chamorel told me.

In 2015, elections are likely in Britain and Spain. And don’t even think about Italy, where the jury-rigged coalition government that includes both the left-leaning Democrats and Silvio Berlusconi’s conservatives could fall any time.

Does all this continental intrigue matter? Yes. Europe’s unending recession is holding back a global recovery.