Gabriel accused Merkel’s Bavarian ally Horst Seehofer of making “unnecessary” demands and distracting from what he said were the “real challenges” in taking in and helping the refugees.
The vast majority of the up to 1-million people expected to arrive in the country this year are crossing the border from Austria into Bavaria.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and her coalition partners ended a meeting on Sunday on how to deal with Germany’s refugee crisis with agreement in a few areas but the need for more talks on other points, a government spokesman said.
Germany’s ruling coalition has failed to reach an agreement on a single refugee policy as the country is facing the largest ever influx of asylum seekers in decades.
Bavaria’s Horst Seehofer (CSU) has turned into a fierce critic of Merkel and her policies in the past weeks.
Since the beginning of the year, over 600,000 migrants have landed on Greece’s shores, according to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.
Gabriel will join Merkel and Seehofer for a discussion on the refugee crisis tomorrow.
“It worries people that well over 10,000 people come every day across the German-Austrian border without us being able to control this in any way”, Jens Spahn, deputy finance minister and CDU member, said Sunday on ARD television.
On Monday, Merkel defended the transit zone proposal at a CDU event in the western city of Darmstadt.
These include limiting the right to political asylum to exceptional cases for nationals from Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo, and accelerating expulsion procedures for those denied asylum.
He added that the “grand coalition” leaders would meet again on Thursday for further negotiations, ahead of a conference of German state leaders.
Germany has become a magnet for economic migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. He would prefer to see asylum requests being directly checked at the border before refugees are even allowed into the country.
As Merkel seeks to defuse the political unrest over her open-door refugee policy, she also confronts waning public approval for her insistence that Germany has a moral and legal obligation to protect all those seeking shelter from war and oppression. He gave Ms. Merkel a deadline until Sunday’s meeting.
Backing for her CDU-led bloc was down two percentage points to 36 percent last week from an August peak of 43 percent, according to a weekly poll carried out by Forsa, Bloomberg reported.
A woman waits in front of a wall newspaper in the initial reception center for asylum seekers in Halle/Saale, Germany, Friday, October 16, 2015.
“Support for Merkel is dropping”, Dr Andrea Roemmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, said in an interview.
The unprecedented influx has opened up divisions within the ruling coalition, with the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s conservatives demanding tougher measures such as transit zones at Germany’s land borders to reduce the number of new arrivals. “What she can not lose is public support”.