She failed at the weekend to win over Gabriel’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD), junior partner in her coalition, and the row has not only rocked her government, but also provoked rare criticism of her leadership both outside and within her conservative bloc.

Almost 10,000 refugees continued to arrive in Germany daily, police said yesterday, highlighting the scale of the challenge facing the country’s stretched border staff ahead of a crunch meeting between Angela Merkel and a Bavarian ally on the crisis.

Hopes of Germany’s governing coalition hammering out a new policy to better manage the unabated stream of migrants to the country seemed unrealistic Sunday after crisis talks failed to end in consensus. In the last two months, 344,000 refugees entered Bavaria, according to the state’s interior ministry.

The disagreement threatens another stormy week for the beleaguered chancellor as lawmakers return to Berlin for a parliamentary session that will again be dominated by the projected arrival of as many as a million asylum seekers in Germany this year.

Last week, Horst Seehofer, prime minister of Bavaria and chief of the CSU, threatened to take unilateral action to stop refugees at the border unless Ms. Merkel caves in to demands to stop the flow of refugees. “We must send a signal that we can’t help everyone in this world who is somehow in need, as hard as it is”.

Among the unresolved matters is the concept of so-called transit zones, according to Seibert.

Germany is the prime destination for asylum seekers from the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Asia, who are coming in unprecedented numbers to Europe this year.

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. She said she would prefer to reject migrants from countries deemed safe by the government directly at Germany’s borders because this would speed up deportation procedures.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that the pair will meet with Social Democratic Party (SPD) head Sigmar Gabriel on Sunday. A record 218,394 refugees fled across the Mediterranean Sea in October, more than in all of a year ago, the United Nations refugee agency said.

As the chancellor seeks to defuse the political unrest over her open-door refugee policy, she also confronts waning public approval. A weekly survey by pollster Emnid put support for the CDU/CSU steady at 36 percent, but still far below the 43 percent the allies enjoyed as recently as August.

Merkel will be able to parry threats from the CSU and within her own party, said Andrea Roemmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

The CDU and CSU sought Sunday to paper over their divisions with a joint statement which proposed to suspend for two years the possibility for refugees given “subsidiary protection” – a status that falls short of full asylum – to have family members join them in Germany. “What she can not lose is public support”.