LONDON — A day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson presented his plan to lead Britain out of the European Union — a dense farrago of details about customs unions, regulatory zones and borders running in two directions — Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar, offered a simple response: Why not just vote again?

“All the polls since Johnson became prime minister suggest that’s what the British people actually want, but their political system isn’t able to give them that choice,” Mr. Varadkar said on Thursday during a visit to Sweden.

The spectacle of an Irish leader opining on the dysfunction of British politics — not to mention brushing aside Mr. Johnson’s oft-repeated vow to carry out the will of the people by delivering Brexit — does not sit well with many in Britain. But there is little they can do about it.

Mr. Varadkar, a 40-year-old physician-turned-politician, holds the crucial vote on whether Mr. Johnson’s plan will pass muster with Brussels. Unless Mr. Johnson can satisfy him that it will not disrupt the fragile peace in Northern Ireland, it is highly unlikely that he will be able to persuade the other 26 members of the European Union to accept it.

Brexit has inverted the age-old power dynamic between Britain and Ireland. No longer an impoverished vassal state languishing next to an empire, Ireland has developed a bustling economy within the European Union. It commands the backing of the other member states as it deals with the potential impact of Brexit, which is political as well as economic.

Small wonder, then, that after Mr. Johnson outlined the details of the proposal on Wednesday, all eyes turned not to Brussels or other European capitals but to Dublin for Mr. Varadkar’s reaction.

So far, his verdict is: no.

“The proposals that have been put forward by the U.K. are certainly welcome in the sense that we now have written proposals that we can engage on,” he said on Thursday in a characteristically measured response that nonetheless drove in the knife. “But they do fall short in a number of aspects.”

Ireland, Mr. Varadkar said, would not accept the construction of checkpoints to police trade between north and south, something that Mr. Johnson’s proposal would require. Nor would it accept giving Northern Ireland’s Assembly — which has been suspended since its governing coalition collapsed in January 2017 in a sectarian dispute — a veto over the plan once every four years, which the proposal stipulates.

His chilly response has angered unionist forces in Northern Ireland, who want to protect the territory’s status as part of the United Kingdom and who say that Mr. Varadkar is torpedoing a proposal that they could finally embrace.

But Mr. Varadkar’s objections were quickly echoed by European leaders. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, consulted with him before calling Mr. Johnson to tell him that his plan fell short. Later, Mr. Tusk reaffirmed that the European Union would “stand fully” behind Ireland.

Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the German Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said that this unity was central to the bloc’s ethos. “Solidarity is at the heart of what the European Union is about,” he said. “The smaller you are, the more you need it.”

He said that Mr. Johnson’s plan would not work because it was an “attempt to square the circle.”

Under the proposal, Northern Ireland would remain aligned with European regulations on food safety and other issues. But it would leave the European customs union — the bloc’s free trade area, which has common external tariffs — as would Britain.

Mr. Varadkar has ruled out any proposal that would require customs checks, because it would mean a return to the border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which will remain part of the European Union. That border was erased after the 1998 signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended years of sectarian strife in the north.

He also objects to the requirement that the Northern Irish Assembly approve Mr. Johnson’s plan, because it would hand an effective veto to the Democratic Unionist Party, a Northern Ireland-based group that has propped up the Conservatives in Parliament since June 2017, when they lost their majority in a snap election under Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May.

The Democratic Unionists have thwarted previous efforts to hammer out a Brexit deal on Northern Ireland, arguing that the proposals would distance the territory from Britain.

“I don’t think anybody is calling Varadkar and saying, ‘You’ve got to bend on this,’” said Bobby McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to Britain. “He’s not under significant pressure from his E.U. partners. There is a tremendous solidarity, which is missed through the London lens.”

That solidarity is not just about the protection of Europe’s single market, which allows the free movement of goods and services within the bloc, though that is a powerful motivation.

It is also rooted in history, Mr. Röttgen said, and in particular a European appreciation of the Good Friday accord, which was hammered out over 700 days of grinding negotiations.

Putting up border controls would violate the spirit of that agreement, analysts said, and could set off new violence. British and Irish officials worry that checkpoints, even if they are placed unobtrusively away from the border, would be targets for terrorist attacks.

The Good Friday Agreement looms large, officials said — whether in Germany, which has struggled to settle a legacy of war and division; in Spain, which has been vexed by the Basque and Catalan separatist movement; or in the Baltic States, which have escaped the grip of Soviet domination.

“Europeans understand how hard it is to get a peace agreement,” said Monica McWilliams, an academic and former politician in Belfast who was involved in the Good Friday negotiations. “They’re very sympathetic to the Irish position.”

By all accounts, Mr. Varadkar and Mr. Johnson have a respectful relationship. When the British prime minister visited Dublin last month, Mr. Varadkar welcomed him with an anecdote about Winston Churchill, Mr. Johnson’s hero, spying the Irish coast through the clouds after a long flight from the United States at the end of World War II.

Tall and trim, speaking in clipped sentences, Mr. Varadkar was a stark contrast to the shambling, discursive Mr. Johnson, who rankled some in Dublin by referring to his host as Leo.

Mr. Johnson has shown a tin ear for Irish concerns in other ways.

During the Tory party conference this week, he brushed off the negotiations over Northern Ireland as “essentially a technical discussion of the exact nature of future customs checks.” That antagonized people in Ireland, for whom the North’s status goes to the heart of Irish identity, given the territory’s contested status as a part of Britain, even after the rest of the Ireland won independence in the early 20th century.

Mr. Johnson has also made it clear that the alternative to a Brexit agreement is a no-deal exit, even if his government confirmed in legal submissions on Friday that it would seek an extension to Britain’s withdrawal deadline at the end of the month if it had not struck a deal with Brussels by Oct. 19.

A no-deal Brexit would hurt Ireland more than any country aside from Britain itself, a factor that could increase domestic political pressure on Mr. Varadkar. But the Irish leader has faced no real opposition at home to his hold-the-line approach.

Analysts said he would be more damaged by acquiescing to a British proposal that created many of the same problems as a chaotic British departure.

As Mr. Varadkar made the rounds in Europe, he vowed to work with Mr. Johnson to get to an acceptable deal — but not at any cost.

“We are ready for no-deal if that’s what the British decide to do,” he said.

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