PARIS — First he conquered France. Now he's going for the entire European Union.

Emmanuel Macron is set to lay out his grand vision for the European Union on Tuesday in a speech laden with symbolism at Paris' Sorbonne University.

The speech will provide more detail on his campaign pledges to push for a eurozone budget, parliament and finance minister. Macron will insist on the need to give citizens a greater say in what happens in the EU, including by inviting them to participate in "democratic conventions," or public debates, in every member country early next year, according to aides to the French president.

However, what initially appeared to be judicious timing — two days after the German election that was expected to boost Angela Merkel's mandate for EU reform — now looks less auspicious, with the German chancellor likely to form a coalition that includes the skeptical Free Democrats (FDP), rather than slipping into another Europhile "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats.

That could spell trouble for Macron's strategy, which is already being given a test-run across the EU by "shock troops" from his centrist La République En Marche (LRM) movement, who are establishing contacts and building friendships and alliances. What for? "To build a European En Marche," Sabine Thillaye, head of the European Affairs Commission in the French parliament, said, referring to the grassroots movement that hoisted Macron to power in record time last May.

The initiative is still embryonic, and MPs are "working toward Macron" rather than executing precise orders. The idea is to lay the groundwork for a European alliance of parties, or even an actual party, that supports Macron's vision of a more "protective" EU in time for the European Parliament election in 2019.

If such a group won a sizable chunk of the EU chamber, it would provide major backup for Macron's plan and act as a counterweight to the more Euroskeptic Northern European liberals.

"We are trying to establish links with other European parliaments. It's not yet clear who is going to be favorable to our initiatives ... The thing to remember is that our group [French] is made up of people from all sorts of different backgrounds, from a range of different parties," added Thillaye.

One of Macron's "agents," a 31-year-old MP for the Benelux region named Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, is already in touch with sympathetic counterparts in four EU states. "The ALDE group is an ideological base," he said. "But it's not our universal home. We want to go wider ... We also have people from the S&D [Socialists & Democrats] and EPP [conservative European People's Party] who want to join."

Pax Macron

Before Macron can storm the European Parliament, however, he needs to build plenty of support for his European ideas, especially in Germany.

That won't come easily.

In a worst-case scenario for France, Germany's Social Democrats (SPD) have ruled out another "grand coalition" with Merkel's conservatives, meaning she is likely to rely on a partnership with the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, who have made no secret of their distaste for just about all of Macron's EU reform proposals.

"If she allies with the FDP, I'm dead," Le Monde quoted the French president as saying in July, referring to his European agenda.

A day after her reelection, with a conservative-FDP-Green coalition on the cards, the German chancellor was already sounding cooler about Macron's vision, saying: "My view is that we can use more Europe, but this has to lead to more competitiveness, more jobs and more clout for the European Union."

"Europe will really exist when we have European parties and trade unions." — Liberal MEP and Macron supporter Jean Arthuis

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani, who met with Macron in Paris last Friday, is also skeptical on some points — especially proposals for a new parliament for the eurozone.

"We already have a controversy about the two seats of the European Parliament. What would the new parliament be? Sitting where? With what powers? I don't think we need yet another parliament, perhaps with a third seat," he told the Europresse association before meeting Macron.

But while Tajani is minding his office and Merkel is minding coalition partners with whom she will rule for the next four years, Macron is making plans for the next decade.

Aides said he sees potential for a major lurch forward in the EU, underpinned by the same type of voters who backed him in France: pro-European, educated and optimistic. In his bid to gather all such people into a vast, single tent ahead of the European Parliament election in 2019, he's enlisted an important ally: the European Commission.

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker's team is liaising with members of the French parliament to study the feasibility of holding democratic debates about the EU in every member country, said Thillaye. National governments will have to agree. But with a nudge from the Commission and assurance that the debate aims only to establish a sense of "what is working and not working in the European Union," France could have its way in a respectable number of countries.

The Commission recently met with a task force of French MPs devoted to organizing "democratic conventions," according to Thillaye. Their marching orders are to figure out the correct format and timing for conventions to be held in the first quarter of 2018, with a range of options still under consideration.

"The idea is to lay out a sort of citizens' State of the Union — what works and what doesn't," said Thillaye. "We don't want to reproduce what the Commission has already tried for building EU sentiment."

An aide to Macron said: "The idea is to prepare public opinion for a debate about the future of the European Union. You cannot do this by having a debate between technocrats in a room in Brussels. You need to associate citizens from the start ... And it's no use having referendums on these questions in each country, because people never answer the question they are asked."

Tajani voiced support for the idea of democratic debates, and said he would host one during a session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, inviting citizens from across the bloc.

'Superfluous'

At the same time, Macron's MPs are hard at work trying to find allies in other countries. Jean Arthuis, a liberal MEP, president of the Parliament's budgets committee and supporter of Macron, told POLITICO there was a need to move beyond national political considerations and start establishing EU-wide groups.

"If we want to get beyond these little arrangements among friends, we should pick Europe as our space of sovereignty," he said. "Europe will really exist when we have European parties and trade unions."

Anglade, the young En Marche MP, said he had positive feedback from counterparts in Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary and the Netherlands. His aim is to build a "progressive coalition" — in other words, a European En Marche — by next September.

“Creating another party in Europe would be excessively superfluous” — Franck Engel, European People’s Party member

"Everybody is wondering what we are going to do," he said. "We don't have contact with Forza Europa but I am looking closely at them," he added referring to the party founded earlier this year by Benedetto Della Vedova, an Italian economist.

Thillaye declined to say which EU parties might be open to alliances or coalitions with En Marche. But she said there would be no ideological or right-left hangups about potential allies.

However, not everyone is ready quite yet to be "on the move" with Macron.

Liberals, not just in Germany but also in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Northern Europe have a very different view from Macron on what constitutes an ideal EU — one that emphasizes free trade with the outside world rather than new protections and anti-dumping tariffs.

"Creating another party in Europe would be excessively superfluous," said Franck Engel, a member of the European People's Party from Luxembourg. "There are so many of them. What would it be? Social Democrat? We have it. Liberal? We have it."

Another skeptic pointed to the fact that across Europe, political and economic conditions are not what they were in France when Macron came to power.

"You must feel that everything around you is falling apart,” said the official, who asked not to be named. "In the EU, it’s not really the case."