YOU might think Emmanuel Macron deserves a moment to catch his breath. Just half a year ago he pulled off one of the most audacious political coups in recent European history, trouncing a tired political establishment to become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon. He created a political party from scratch and took it to a triple-digit majority in parliament. He has energetically set about reforming France’s labour market and tax system. Yet having pulled off all this at home, Mr Macron now hopes to repeat the trick across the European Union.

Surveying the continent, Mr Macron spots similar dysfunction to that he observed in France and wants to apply similar remedies. Allow globalisation to run untempered, he reckons, and you generate vicious backlashes à la Brexit and Donald Trump. Animated by a mission to save the EU from populists like Marine Le Pen, whom he bested in the presidential election on the most pro-European platform French voters had seen for a generation, Mr Macron has an answer: “a Europe that protects”.

His fellow leaders have quickly learned what this means. Mr Macron has tried to slam the brakes on speedy trade deals that may inject a dose of growth into Europe’s economy but that he fears could alienate citizens and parliaments. He has trained his guns on rules that allow eastern Europeans to avoid expensive social charges in the west. Ask French workers to swallow labour reforms while they are undercut by Poles working alongside them, Mr Macron judges, and you do Ms Le Pen’s work for her. (A recent deal on these “posted workers” gave Mr Macron his first big European win.) No matter if such efforts do little for Europeans’ pockets; Mr Macron believes in symbols.

He also believes in reform, especially to the EU’s semi-built common currency. Mr Macron is desperate to dispel suspicions in Germany that he wants a “transfer union” in which prudent northern European taxpayers are shaken down to subsidise the indolent elsewhere. That is indeed a gross caricature of a vision that, at its best, combines financial, macroeconomic and institutional proposals to help the euro weather the next storm. But the long years of internecine euro-zone conflict have left deep scars. There is a striking disconnect between the optimism that persists in Paris and the steady downward ratchet of expectations in Berlin as Angela Merkel’s difficult coalition talks grind on.

Most disruptive of all could be Mr Macron’s attempt to overhaul the EU’s party politics before the European Parliament elections in 2019, rather as his La République en Marche tore up the French system. The parliament’s groupings bundle together supposedly like-minded parties from across the EU: the European People’s Party houses the centre-right, the Socialists and Democrats group caters to leftists, and so on. Unlike almost every other national party in Europe, Mr Macron’s is aligned to none of them.

That is partly because it is barely 18 months old. But Mr Macron’s advisers reckon Europe’s flabby and incoherent groups are ripe for disruption. The EPP, for instance, bunches Mrs Merkel’s centrist Christian Democrats with the Hungarian nationalists of Fidesz. Just as they did in France, Mr Macron’s advisers want to reconfigure European politics to set advocates of openness and collaboration against populists and Eurosceptics, and seek partners who share this view. Feelers have been put out to pro-Europeans in Spain, the Netherlands and elsewhere. As time is tight, ALDE, a grouping of liberal centrists, though small, could possibly serve as a base.

Through a series of “democratic conventions” across Europe (another idea tried out in France) shepherded by Nathalie Loiseau, his Europe minister, Mr Macron will seek to assemble a programme for the 2019 election, and perhaps the basis for his own group in the parliament. That will give him a platform to help determine a replacement for Jean-Claude Juncker, who will retire as president of the European Commission, the powerful Brussels bureaucracy, soon after the election. One name doing the rounds in Paris is Margrethe Vestager, the commission’s competition tsar. Her flair, taste for public relations and punchy attacks on tax-dodging tech firms make her a natural fit for Mr Macron.

Appetite for destruction

Europe had become so resigned to a weak France that it has struggled to adjust to what Pascal Lamy, a French former director-general of the World Trade Organisation, calls “Macron’s method of motion”. Mr Macron’s energy has electrified Europe, but also raised fears—and not only in the east—that if left untrammelled it could prove more divisive than constructive. Mr Macron enjoys picking fights when expedient, especially with Poland. Ivan Korcok, Slovakia’s Europe minister, compared Mr Macron’s European approach to dashing up the summit of Mount Everest without oxygen. Better to wait at base camp to ensure the whole team is present. Others suspect they are witnessing no more than a redressing of old French protectionism in shiny clothes.

This presents a new challenge for Mr Macron. He spotted before anyone else that French voters were ready for a fix to their broken politics, and seized the moment to provide it. The parallel in Europe is not precise. One sympathetic observer warns that some Europeans will be reluctant to join Mr Macron’s “Napoleonic endeavours” if he seeks to scramble their domestic party politics. More pressingly, Mr Macron will have to find a way to yoke his energy to the caution of Mrs Merkel as she plods towards her political twilight.

Slightly tempered ambition might be no bad thing for a president with a tendency to hubris. Europe’s multiple fissures and identity neuroses do not lend themselves to straightforward solutions. “Macron is the candidate of rationality in a continent torn by passion,” says Dominique Moïsi, a scholar at the Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think-tank. France was ready for Mr Macron’s revolution. Europe may need a little more time.