Horst Seehofer, Bavaria’s governor and leader of the Bavarian branch of Merkel’s conservative bloc, has criticized Merkel’s welcoming approach to refugees for weeks, stridently demanding federal government action.

To speed up the asylum process, Germany has unveiled new plans, after the governing coalition resolved a rift on the issue, on Friday, a media report said.

Merkel said in a speech Tuesday “if we don’t manage this, that could be a reason for many, many refugee movements” around the world.

Berlin has already taken a firmer line against asylum-seekers from nations not at war, leading to a sharp drop in October of arrivals from Balkans states. Most were from Syria – with 88,640 Syrian refugees on the ministry’s records – followed by Albania, Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo.

The agreement between the ruling CDU/CSU alliance and junior coalition partner, the Social Democrats, came as the European Commission said it expected the number of people fleeing war and poverty to Europe to reach three million by 2017.

The huge influx of asylum seekers has caused political turmoil across the European Union (EU) with member states disagreeing about how to deal with the crisis.

“We need cooperation with the country from which the refugees are embarking so we can organize border protection jointly”, she told an audience of industrialists in Dusseldorf Wednesday night.

Two more children, a young girl and six-year-old boy, died in the quest for a new life Thursday, adding to the grim toll of around 3,400 deaths in Mediterranean migrant shipwrecks this year, many of them minors.

Merkel’s other coalition allies, the centre-left Social Democrats, have rejected closed camps and proposed other ways of encouraging newcomers to head to “reception centres” nationwide, such as making registration there a condition for receiving benefits. “That is why cooperation with Turkey is of the essence”. Their last round of talks Sunday ended in disagreement.

A senior Conservative today accused Angela Merkel of offering “false hope” to millions of potential refugees with her open-door policy on migration.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, her most important CDU lieutenant, brushed aside doubts that Germany can not afford to shelter so many new arrivals, more than 1% of its population.

But he told parliament that the country had the funds necessary to meet the challenge.