President Emmanuel Macron of France risked creating an East-West rift in Europe on Friday after warning that Poland was heading for "the margins" of the bloc.

Poland hit back that the French premier was "arrogant", inexperienced, and had no right to push it around.

The spat came after after Warsaw categorically rejected Mr Macron's push to overhaul the so-called "posted workers" directive - a controversial EU rule enabling companies to send temporary workers from low-wage countries to richer ones without paying local social charges.

Speaking in the Bulgarian coastal city of Varna, Mr Macron said: "Poland today is not a country that can show Europe the way, it's a country that has decided to go against European interests in many areas."

"Europe was built on public freedoms that Poland is infringing today," he added.

"The country is placing itself on the margins of Europe's future history," he added, saying it had "isolated itself". Mr Macron had already prompted Polish ire recently by warning it could not treat the EU like a "supermarket".