As Veronique de Rugy observed, Barack Obama’s going to have to get up when the Europeans do if he hopes to have a chance of upstaging the guy married to Carla Bruni during his victory lap around Europe.

This morning, Figaro carried a repeat of Sarkozy’s by now familiar warning that if the G20 meeting in London doesn’t go his way, he’ll rip himself away from sitting across the table from Gordon Brown and go home to sit across from the missus, leaving behind an empty chair and a blizzard of headlines.

Politically, that may play in France, where the country’s return to full NATO posing irritated many of the old-line contrarians. But just as many may see a grandstanding act of petulance as walking away from what the paper calls the planet’s “economic hemorrhage.”

The main thing Sarko wants at the G20 is the appointment of a (no doubt French) global financial wazoo, a planetary regulator in the best European tradition, and if he doesn’t get it (and he won’t), uh . . . well, he’ll settle for something else, like maybe a clampdown on tax havens or something that will make it appear he went to London and did something magnificent.

The French having pioneered the art of spending themselves into stagnation — Le Monde reported more evidence of that today — have now joined with the Germans in declining to follow the American model of avoiding poverty by going deeper in debt. He’s getting a tiny bit of support for that at home — although, as always in French politics, le président scores his highest marks flapping among the foreigners.

Everybody in Europe loves Obama. But not everybody’s impressed by him. Figaro calls him “a European superstar who doesn’t know Europe.” In case anybody had any doubt about that, there’s the bizarre note — analyzed with delight by No Pasaran! — he sent to Jacques Chirac, perhaps the only living human less popular in France than George W. Bush. Since the motif of the eight-day tour is “better-than-Bush!” — which is not so much a standard as a limbo stick — fluffing Chirac’s plumage may be a mistake.