On Sunday, when the 27 leaders had their first round of deliberations, emotions ran high and some tough exchanges soon leaked out to the news media, designed as ever to make individual leaders look smarter, more intelligent or more courageous than the others.
For all the talk of European solidarity, these summit meetings tend to be covered — and briefed by officials — as boxing matches, with every national delegation trying to show its boss as the champion of national interests against the collective horde.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain tried that on Sunday, insisting that there be a full summit meeting of all 27 members of the European Union on Wednesday, as well as a meeting of the 17 nations that use the euro. Facing an internal party revolt, he means to protect Britain’s interests, he said, in case the euro zone countries get ahead of themselves and do damage to the single market that is one of the European Union’s greatest strengths.
But President Nicolas Sarkozy of France turned on him, fed up with criticism of the euro crisis from Mr. Cameron and especially from George Osborne, the young British chancellor of the exchequer, or treasury minister.
“You’ve lost a good opportunity to shut up,” Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Cameron, the same phrase his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, once used about his Polish counterpart. “We’re sick of you criticizing us and telling us what to do. You say you hate the euro, and now you want to interfere in our meetings.”
This exchange was leaked by British diplomats and officials, but French officials did not deny the essence of it. Mr. Sarkozy, they confirmed, is not a great fan of kibitzing from outside the euro zone (Britain is not a member). Mr. Sarkozy barked at a French journalist, too, saying essentially that comment is cheap and governing is hard.
Mr. Sarkozy and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, are compelled to work together, but find each other difficult and even odd. She has been known to make fun of the way he gestures and walks, comparing him to the old French comic Louis de Funès, with his wavy hair and prominent nose. He has been known to call her La Boche, an offensive French version of “Kraut,” and mocks what he sees as her matronly caution.
But their relationship is said to have improved of late, and Sunday evening there were “informal” photos of the two of them as he opened her present, a Steiff teddy bear, for his newborn daughter, Giulia.
The “Franco-German couple” ganged up on the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. They criticized him for not following through on his promises of economic and governmental restructuring, saying Italy’s failure to move quickly was putting not just Italy but also the euro at risk.
The whole point of beefing up a new bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, was to be able to protect Italy from bond speculators, but Italy had to act too, they told him, officials said. Mr. Berlusconi pretended to fall asleep at one point, officials said, and afterward said he had never been held back a year at school.
Even in public, at a news conference, Mrs. Merkel lectured Italy about making “credible” reductions in its huge debt — 120 percent of its gross domestic product. And Mr. Sarkozy, when asked if he had confidence in Mr. Berlusconi, said only that he had confidence in the whole of Italian society — “political, financial, economic.”
Part of Mr. Sarkozy’s annoyance is not just economic, but stems also from a sense of betrayal. The new head of the European Central Bank is to be Mario Draghi, an Italian who replaces a Frenchman, Jean-Claude Trichet, in part because the obvious German candidate quit the bank in disgust over its supposedly overly liberal credit policies.
In return for supporting Mr. Draghi, Mr. Sarkozy got Mr. Berlusconi to agree to move another Italian, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, from the bank’s executive board to make room for a French banker. Mr. Bini Smaghi said he would quit only if he replaced Mr. Draghi as head of Italy’s Central Bank. But in the end, Mr. Berlusconi felt compelled by domestic politics to give that job to another person, so Mr. Bini Smaghi remains where he is and Paris has no one on the board, a political humiliation for Mr. Sarkozy.
Mrs. Merkel, too, has personal reasons to be angry with Mr. Berlusconi, who described her to an Italian editor friend, in a wiretapped conversation, with a disparaging, sexist and unprintable phrase.
On Monday, Mr. Berlusconi issued a statement saying that “nobody in the union can appoint himself commissioner and speak in the name of elected governments and the peoples of Europe. No one is in a position to be giving lessons to their partners.”
He also said that Italy had its own clear ideas of how to solve the crisis, including the banking crisis, which he said was particularly turbulent in France and Germany. And while Italy has a large accumulated debt, he pointed out that it has a primary surplus and only a small budget deficit that he said would be eliminated by 2013.
The pro-Berlusconi part of the Italian news media also took aim. A front-page article in Milan’s Il Giornale was headlined “To Hell with Sarkozy” and supported a “laugh-in” in front of the French Embassy in Rome. The paper, owned by Mr. Berlusconi’s brother, Paolo, said: “To dump the political problems between France and Germany onto Italy: this was the agenda of the duo in Brussels. Sarkozy has set the tone. But the bankers, investors and savers in France are not laughing. They’re holding more than 400 billion euros in Italian securities,” while in Italy, “the public patrimony and private savings are unbeatable and the unemployment rate is better than in France. It’s our turn to laugh now.”
European Union officials tried to calm matters, saying on Tuesday that there was no attempt to humiliate Italy, but that Rome had to keep its promises. “What is happening in Italy has an impact on all members of the euro zone,” the commission’s economic affairs spokesman, Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio, said in Brussels. “There is no humiliation. It is surveillance by peers, which is absolutely normal within an economic and monetary union. It is about safeguarding the financial stability of the euro zone.”
Summit meetings of so many leaders can be awkward, especially with so much at stake and with the finance ministers throwing up their hands on Tuesday and seeking more political guidance from their leaders. Proposed solutions to the sovereign debt, banking and institutional crisis absorbing Europe are extremely detailed and annoying to national leaders who must, afterward, stand up and explain to journalists and their own voters what has not quite been agreed upon or even very fully understood.
Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister who helped lead the meeting, called Sunday’s session “stormy.” Wednesday’s meeting is likely to be blustery, as well.
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