In a scathing front-page editorial this week titled “Boris the Menace,” the conservative French daily Le Figaro took aim at Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “In this venerable parliamentary democracy whose unwritten Constitution is woven from a fragile fabric of conventions and fair play,” the paper wrote, “the prime minister’s bad manners create a dangerous precedent, revealing the vulnerabilities of the system.” It continued on to say that by forcing a hard Brexit, one in which Britain would cut most of its link to the EU and its institutions, Johnson was laying the groundwork for a future election campaign, one “against the elites and the establishment. Haven’t we seen this before?”

When the Brexit referendum was held in 2016, continental Europe was shocked, and afraid Brexit might bring down Europe. If a country could just leave, the thinking went, what was stopping others who were frustrated with the EU’s rules and regulations from simply walking away, too? Then, in the ensuing years, especially after the failures of former Prime Minister Theresa May, its attitude toward Brexit shifted—from fear for itself to concern for Britain. The Brexit vote “was a big scare for Europe,” Pierre Haski, a foreign-affairs commentator for France Inter radio, told me. “And we went from that to ‘Pity the British.’”

When France’s “yellow vest” movement emerged last fall, it revealed a divide in the country between rural and urban, and a groundswell of discontent. President Emmanuel Macron has been able to, at least so far, harness that into a national debate rather than a perilous one-issue referendum. Elsewhere, such as Italy, far-right parties that once advocated leaving the euro have softened their rhetoric, content to gut the EU from within, wary of a backlash from a public that has watched chaos in Britain from afar. In Greece, which faced an actual threat of exiting the euro, the political class has been bemused by the Brexiteers’ delusion that the EU would be lenient.

Read: France’s yellow vests are rebels without a cause

The arrival of Johnson in Downing Street has marked a turning point in how Europe views the United Kingdom. For a while, continental Europe laughed along with Johnson—who was foreign secretary in the early part of May’s government—or rolled its eyes at his over-the-topness. That was the case as recently as late August, when Johnson, by then prime minister, met with Macron and rested his foot, roguishly, on his coffee table, projecting an image of studied insouciance, of sticking it to the French.

Yet Johnson had put his foot up after Macron had, at least symbolically, put his down—making clear that Europe was running low on patience and would not grant Britain more concessions, and that European officials believed it was up to Johnson to pull his socks up and present concrete proposals for how Brexit would unfold. Macron believes Brexit will weaken the U.K., leading to a “historic vassalization” caught between other powers—the United States, China, Europe.