LONDON — Two months after Ireland joined Greece in accepting an international bailout for its debt-wracked economy, the political reckoning for the Dublin government entered a decisive phase on Friday with the announcement that Parliament would be dissolved on Tuesday ahead of a general election.

No date for the election was set, but aides to Prime Minister Brian Cowen, whose political career has been effectively ended by the financial crisis, indicated that the likely day was Feb. 25. The vote will come a year earlier than normal in the Irish political calendar, forced by what has amounted to a meltdown of the Cowen government’s authority as Ireland has plummeted from a decade of unprecedented boom to the brink of bankruptcy and a $114 billion international bailout.

If recent opinion polls are a guide, the Fianna Fail party, which replaced Mr. Cowen as its leader on Wednesday with the former foreign minister Micheal Martin, faces a stunning election defeat. The polls have shown the party with less than 20 percent support among voters, down from 42 percent at the last general election in 2007, a showing that would probably cost it half or more of the 72 seats it currently holds in the 166-seat Dail, the lower house of Parliament.

A repudiation on that scale would stand as a warning to other European governments like Portugal and Spain that are struggling with huge amounts of debt and seen as possible candidates for the harsh economic medicine accepted by the Cowen government: an international bailout tied to a domestic austerity program imposing steep tax increases and government spending cuts.

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Ireland’s course to the election was cleared on Thursday when lawmakers in the Dail approved a finance bill that included elements of the Cowen government’s austerity package that had not previously been approved, including income tax increases for the country’s two million-strong work force, up to an effective rate of 41 percent for many middle-income earners. Parliament had previously approved steep cuts in the minimum wage, welfare benefits and cabinet ministers’ salaries, an increase in school fees, and a raising of the state pension age.