BERLIN –

Germany needs to limit the number of refugees it takes in or even close its borders, conservative allies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel said over the weekend, as the country deals with record inflows of people fleeing war and poverty.

Around 800,000 migrants are expected to arrive this year in Germany, Europe's largest and richest economy, and complaints are growing among politicians, the federal states and the municipalities that they cannot cope.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Europe needed to restrict the refugee intake, and members of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party to Merkel's conservatives in Bavaria, said Germany should shut its borders. Bavaria shares a border with Austria and has borne the brunt of the influx.

"If as many asylum seekers continue to come to Germany as in recent weeks, we won't have any choice but to temporarily stop taking people in and to close the borders to them," CSU politician Stephan Mayer told newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS).

Thousands of people are streaming into Germany every day, attracted by relatively liberal asylum laws and generous benefits. Some 6,750 people arrived in Bavaria alone on Friday and another 6,000 on Saturday, a police spokesman said.

But Merkel told German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk that Germany must tackle the crisis head-on rather than try to get rid of the problem. Building fences along borders was "pointless," she said, as refugees would find another way to enter Europe.

While the refugee crisis was a "very big task," Germany could cope, she said. It needed to speed up its asylum procedure, better protect its borders, deal with the reasons driving people to flee at the source and ensure that refugees are fairly distributed around Europe.

Merkel's popularity has slumped to its lowest level in nearly four years on concerns about migrants but support for the conservatives, made up of Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and the CSU, remains high at 40 percent, according to the latest opinion polls.

Pressure on Merkel is now mounting, and some politicians urged her to introduce upper limits for migrant intake.

"We can't save the whole world," Bavarian Finance Minister and CSU member Markus Soeder told Passauer Neue Presse.

CDU politician Lorenz Caffier told newspaper Welt am Sonntag that as many as 1.5 million refugees could arrive in Germany this year, but that many of the federal states "are at their limit."

Members of the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel's junior coalition partner, also stressed that Germany had exhausted its ability to deal with the crisis.

The SPD's Malu Dreyer, premier of Rhineland-Palatinate, said volunteers were working "at breaking point," while senior SPD member Thomas Oppermann said a million refugees would take Germany to the limit of its ability to provide accommodation.