PARIS — Barack Obama may have captivated the European imagination with his unexpected rise to the presidency and a softer-than-Bush foreign policy, but his political magnetism is showing its limits just two months into the job, as many European leaders balk at his call to match his administration's attempt to spend its way out of recession.
With finance ministers from the leading industrial and developing nations -- members of the Group of 20 -- preparing to address the global economic crisis at a summit this weekend in London, signs are emerging that the United States and Europe have different ideas about what constitutes the best tonic.
President Obama on Wednesday again urged other countries to boost public spending as he is doing, in hope of encouraging demand that will get their economies rolling.
But many European leaders say they have stimulated their economies enough. What the world needs now, they say, are tougher, globally enforced regulations on financial markets to avoid a repeat of the mistakes that led to the current troubles.
This week, they pushed back against Obama's plan.
"We are not ready to increase the packages we have established for the current situation," said Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister and finance minister of Luxembourg and head of a European economic commission that met Tuesday in Brussels.
"The Americans should be more modest about giving lessons, because the crisis comes from them," Patrick Devedjian, France's minister for recovery, said in a TV interview.
The tough talk has added to the sense of cooling between Europeans and the politician they greeted with almost rapturous affection during his visit to the continent last year. "Disagreement between Obama and the Europeans over the recovery," the respected French daily Le Figaro proclaimed on its front page Wednesday.
The divisions over economic stimulation represent a role reversal from the conventional U.S. and European positions. Europe is known for being comfortable with using government to try to fix economic problems. The Reagan revolution left Americans skeptical of that approach.
Of course, the panorama of European opinion turns out to be more complicated and nuanced than it might seem. For one thing, the Obama administration shares the belief that the time has come to restrain the excesses of the financial sector. For another, the European Union's hopes for a common economic policy must overcome a web of internal divisions: The French don't always see eye to eye with the Germans, and the aggressive measures taken by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown put him closer to Washington than to Brussels.
