Rehn faced a torrent of criticism and a call to resign after helping broker a rescue package from Cyprus that fell apart on Tuesday over a demand to raid bank deposits. He has become the defender of German-inspired austerity that helped deepen the 17-nation euro region’s recession.

Almost two years after Rehn announced the “beginning of the end” of the debt crisis, the euro area is headed for a back-to-back annual economic contraction for the first time. Now, Rehn has become a scapegoat as Germany and the International Monetary Fund let the commissioner take the rap for the Cyprus bailout that hangs in limbo, said an EU official who declined to be named.

“As soon as things go wrong, people start looking around for who to blame,” William White, former head of economic analysis at the Bank of International Settlements, said in a March 19 telephone interview. “Everybody will be pointing the finger.”

The conflict over a country that makes up 0.2 percent of the euro zone’s 8.6 trillion-euro ($11 trillion) economy may jeopardize the gains that Rehn helped shepherd over the past three years of crisis fire fighting. In that period, the EU has set up two rescue funds, passed eight economic-governance laws, enacted a deficit-limitation treaty, and agreed to a “roadmap” for a better-run monetary union.

Austerity Criticism

The challenge Rehn, 50, is facing over the Cypriot bailout comes on top of criticism of the austerity he has administered to other nations as a condition for receiving loans.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who has called on European leaders to increase spending to boost growth, labeled Rehn’s policy decisions “cockroach ideas” because they keep coming back no matter how hard you try to stamp them out.

“The amazing thing is the way men who know neither theory nor the history of previous crises are utterly convinced that they know what to do in our current crisis; and how their confidence in their prescriptions has been unaffected by the fact that they have been wrong about everything so far,” Krugman wrote on his blog this month. “What’s even more amazing is the fact that these men are actually running things.”

Greek Forecasts

In May 2010, the Greek government agreed to 30 billion euros of austerity as a condition of its first rescue package. Rehn, three months into his role as budget chief, forecast the Greek economy would contract 3 percent that year and 0.5 percent in 2011.

The economy shrank by 4.9 percent and 7.1 percent as the budget-cutting program crushed domestic demand. Last year, when Rehn forecast a 1.1 percent expansion for Greece, output slumped 6.4 percent, according to the commission’s latest estimate published last month.

Krugman has “engaged in more of a zoological debate than an economic debate,” Rehn told the Finnish newspaper Helsingen Sanomat this month. “It’s been unclear to me where the money for the stimulus would have come from.”

Rehn, who received a doctorate in international political economy from Oxford University, describes himself as a fan of the U.S. counter-culture of the 1960s and traces a line from rock legend Neil Young to incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney, having observed that “Canadians are cool.”

‘Saving Europe’

He cited Carlo Bastasin’s “Saving Europe: How National Politics Nearly Destroyed the Euro” as one of his favorite books of 2012.

“It’s based on a very sound understanding of the economics and politics of the euro, and is well-researched,” he said.

Now he’s fighting those battles all over again, trying to bring together German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, whose government will face bailout-weary voters in September, and Cypriot officials who’ve seen their banking system hobbled by losses on Greek sovereign bonds.

European finance ministers said they had a deal with the International Monetary Fund and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades after negotiating through the night of March 15. Anastasiades agreed to impose a levy of 6.75 percent on bank deposits of up to 100,000 euros and 9.9 percent on amounts above that threshold in return for a 10 billion-euro rescue package.

Unraveling Deal

“This has been a very difficult process, but the result conceived tonight reaches the essential goals of both maintaining financial stability and ensuring debt sustainability in Cyprus,” Rehn said at a press conference shortly before dawn on March 16 in Brussels. “It is so important that this political agreement has now been reached.”

The deal began to unravel almost immediately with protesters on the streets of the Cypriot capital rejecting the deposit tax. Lawmakers killed it March 19 and now officials are scrambling for a Plan B.

“It’s a bit unfair to pick on Rehn, but he’s an easier target than Schaeuble,” Charles Wyplosz, director of the International Center for Money and Banking Studies in Geneva, said in a telephone interview. “Anyone in the room who failed to see that was a mistake is to be blamed.”

Rehn is the one getting the public censure.

Nessa Childers, an Irish member of the European Parliament, called for his resignation in a March 19 letter to Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, which proposes policies enacted after approval by governments and the European Parliament.

“Somebody somewhere has to be accountable and the buck stops with him,” Childers said in a telephone interview. “This was not only undemocratic, but incompetent. Was anyone thinking about the big picture?”