TORONTO — They talked nice, but President Barack Obama and European leaders failed Saturday to bridge a fast-growing divide over government spending and will emerge from a summit charting different courses for ending the global recession.
Obama will head home with his government’s foot on the spending accelerator to stimulate the economy, saying it will cut back later. European leaders are pledging to start cutting back government spending now.
The disagreement was the most notable divide at back-to-back summits of the Group of Eight, featuring the world’s top economies, and the G20 group that adds in fast-emerging nations such as China, Brazil and India.
The G8 leaders were united on other issues. They condemned North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean ship, promised to enforce new sanctions against Iran for its defiant nuclear program, spelled out a five-year exit strategy in Afghanistan and called Israel’s restrictions on the flow of goods into Gaza unsustainable.
They tried to appear unified on the question of spending, despite Obama’s pre-summit warning that European budget cuts now could risk a double dip into global recession and Europe’s refusal to hear that warning.
“I have made it clear that we need sustainable growth and that growth and intelligent austerity measures don’t have to be contradictions,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters Saturday. “The discussion was not controversial. There was a lot of mutual understanding.”
She did not, however, agree not to scale back her government’s spending. Nor did the new conservative government of British Prime Minister David Cameron.
In his pre-summit letter to other leaders, Obama took a different tone, urging them to be ready to spend more and warning against early cutbacks.
“Should confidence in the strength of our recoveries diminish, we should be prepared to respond again as quickly and as forcefully as needed to avert a slowdown,” he said. “We must be flexible . . . and learn from the consequential mistakes of the past.”
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Part of G20 protest turns violent
TORONTO — Black- clad demonstrators broke off from a peaceful protest of the G20 global economic summit, torching police cruisers and smashing windows with baseball bats and hammers.
Police with shields and clubs earlier pushed back another small group of demonstrators who tried to head toward the security fence surrounding the perimeter of the summit site.
Some demonstrators hurled bottles at police.
“This isn’t our Toronto, and my response is anger,” Mayor David Miller told CP24 television. “Every Torontonian should be outraged by this.”
Police cars headed to Toronto to reinforce security after the smaller Group of Eight summit ended in Huntsville, Ontario.
Police in riot gear and riding bikes formed a blockade, keeping protesters from approaching the security fence a few blocks south of the march route. Police closed a stretch of Toronto’s subway system along the protest route, and the largest shopping mall downtown closed after the protest took a turn for the worse. The Associated Press
