Emmanuel Macron’s dream of a federal EU is “far from” what ordinary Europeans desire, the Polish prime minister has said, declaring that “the only realistic solution is to build a Europe of nations”.

In an interview with Le Figaro this week, Mateusz Morawiecki told the French newspaper that their president’s vision of a Brussels-run federal EU superstate is “far from what the peoples [of Europe] desire” and is “detached from reality”.

Highlighting another difference in outlook between the governments in Paris and Warsaw, Morawiecki said he failed to grasp what Macron meant when he asserted last year that “there is no French culture”.

“I do not agree with this, and I think — on the contrary — that the culture of France is one of the greatest in the world,” the Polish leader stated, going on to highlight wider cultural differences between the continent’s west and east.

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“Although Western Europe is becoming less and less Christian, the religion is flourishing and teeming with life in the east of the continent — especially in Poland,” Morawiecki said, stressing that “only by protecting our cultures can we enrich the EU”.

Acknowledging the existence of a number of “misunderstandings” between Poland and France, the Law and Justice (PiS) premier suggested that Macron’s having “offended the countries of eastern and central Europe” with his repeated attacks on nationalism, was rooted in the western states not having experienced decades of “enslavement” under Communism.

The Poles are “realists”, and as such recognise that “the differences of languages ​​and of interests on the continent mean that we will never be able to become the United States of Europe”, Morawiecki said, asserting that the “universal European values” spoken of by proponents of a federal EU do not exist.

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“There is no doubt that we see the future of Europe differently … We have to return to the Europe of nations [model] which respects the interests of all of its members,” insisted the prime minister.

Noting that accepting mass immigration from the third world has not proved popular amongst European electorates, Morawiecki said that Poland proposes to “solve the problem in a different way”, by sending funds to conflict regions.

Poland has been one of the biggest contributors to the EU Economic Resilience Initiative (ERI), donating 50 million towards building hospitals and schools in Lebanon, which hosts a large number of refugees, he pointed out.

“This is a much more effective way to reduce tension around the EU. Our approach is quite different from the one taken by [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel,” Morawiecki told journalist Isabelle Lasserre.