“VARAD the impaler”, “Leo the Lion”, “Gob Almighty”. Any self-respecting Irish politician acquires a range of colourful nicknames, and those attaching to Leo Varadkar, whom parliament will, barring disasters, elevate to prime minister on June 13th, are nothing unusual. If none of them refers to the attributes that have earned Mr Varadkar global attention—that he is half-Indian, gay and, at 38, his country’s youngest-ever leader—that is testament to a society that has lost interest in the bigotries that marked public life in the not-too-distant past.

“Prejudice has no hold in this republic,” declared Mr Varadkar to a rapturous crowd at Dublin’s Mansion House on June 2nd, after winning the leadership of Ireland’s ruling, centre-right Fine Gael party. His rousing words satisfied outsiders seeking a good yarn about a country that decriminalised homosexuality only in 1993, but were atypical for a man who has been reluctant to use his minority status to advance his politics. Indeed, some Irish left-wingers sniffed hypocrisy from a politician who in his time has spurned such causes as gay adoption and once suggested paying unemployed immigrants to return home.

Mr Varadkar is both less and more interesting than that. His identity is not leashed to his politics in the manner of, say, Barack Obama, whose victory hinted at deliverance from America’s deepest trauma. In 2015 he came out as gay in the gentlest of fashions, during a radio interview a few months before Ireland became the first country to pass same-sex marriage by referendum. Comparisons to Emmanuel Macron, France’s fresh-faced new president, are also off the mark. Whereas Mr Macron single-handedly upturned France’s political establishment, Mr Varadkar has taken a familiar route to the top: schooled expensively in Dublin, he used the youth wing of Fine Gael as a springboard to local government, a seat in the parliament and a string of ministerial jobs after his party took office in 2011.

Articulate but sometimes awkward, Mr Varadkar is not wholly comfortable in the back-slapping world of Irish politics. Yet he secured his Fine Gael victory the old-fashioned way, quickly locking in support among his fellow MPs, whose votes counted disproportionately in the contest. His ministerial career, which includes stints running the big-spending departments of health and social protection, is unmarked by either triumph or catastrophe. What has distinguished him is a relaxed approach to ruffling feathers and a growing taste for ideological flexibility.

During the Fine Gael leadership campaign, for example, Mr Varadkar tacked right with a crackdown on welfare cheats, garnished with a Mitt Romney-esque jab at those “who believe they should be entitled to everything for free”. Some other proposals hint at a preference for the free market. Subsidies could be phased out for first-time homebuyers, while effective income-tax rates would be kept below 50%. In response Fianna Fail, the main opposition party, disdains Mr Varadkar as a “Thatcherite”. Yet that is not quite right either: he also speaks of a “new social contract” and promises an investment splurge, funded by more of a leisurely approach to debt-reduction.

The big question is how Mr Varadkar will tackle the daunting in-tray he inherits, from Ireland’s antediluvian health-care system to accusations of police corruption. A strong recovery after Ireland’s banking crisis may provide a tailwind, but non-economic tests lie ahead, too. Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion is likely to be placed before voters next year. Mr Varadkar’s stated preference for a limited liberalisation may come close to the median Irish view, but he must tread carefully on an issue that, unlike gay rights, retains the power to divide. Mr Varadkar must also manage a minority government that Fianna Fail could bring tumbling down at any moment.

And then there is Brexit. The departure of Ireland’s main European trading partner from the single market will force difficult questions on this export-dependent economy. Yet more pressing is the threat to prosperity and peace posed by a possible “hard” border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, which will quit the European Union along with the rest of Britain. Mr Varadkar’s suggestion is to keep the north inside the EU’s customs union, an ingenious but unworkable idea that would in effect shift some border controls to the Irish Sea.

Hipster politics

In some respects—his instinctive pro-Europeanism, his friendliness to business—Mr Varadkar sits squarely in the contemporary Irish tradition. But his political style may mark something of a rupture. He feels no compulsion to indulge paddy-whackery by playing up to stereotypes of false bonhomie or to subsume politics under personal relationships. As one observer puts it, Mr Varadkar’s fellow EU leaders, whom he will meet at a summit in Brussels later this month, may have to get used to “that most unusual of things: a cold-blooded Irishman”.

So how might he leave his mark? After joining Mr Macron on the campaign trail in Paris in April, Mr Varadkar declared his allegiance to the view that the old left-right divide in politics is yielding to a fresh rupture between open and closed. A rethink of the way politics is conducted in Ireland might appeal to parts of an electorate badly served by parties that remain relics of the battle for independence from Britain in the 1920s. Here lies one possible course for Mr Varadkar’s premiership.

But failure cannot be ruled out. Mr Varadkar takes office under trying circumstances without the benefit of a popular mandate. If his rapid ascent hints at an instinct for calculation, on policy his fundamental views remain elusive. Flexibility will prove useful in navigating Brexit and Ireland’s domestic challenges. But if he is to meet the expectations some have heaped upon him, Leo the Lion will need to demonstrate deeper reserves of political steeliness than Ireland has yet demanded of him.