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The unwillingness of most European Union states to accommodate a surge in refugees amassing at the trade bloc’s southern fringes is a “huge disgrace,” German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said.

Speaking on the country’s ARD television Sunday, Gabriel said just three countries -- Germany, Sweden and Austria -- were taking on more refugees, with most states snubbing their plight. By closing the door to people fleeing wars, the EU puts its internal open-border policy at risk, Gabriel said.

“I find it a huge disgrace when the majority of member states say, ’that’s got nothing to do with us’,” said the Social Democrat chairman, whose party co-rules with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “Returning to a Europe without open borders will have catastrophic economic, political and cultural consequences.”

Germany and the EU Commission are failing to break the opposition of EU partners including the U.K., Spain, Denmark and Hungary to taking on a larger share of refugees thronging on the bloc’s borders. Germany can cope with a fourfold influx of refugees this year, to about 800,000, but “not indefinitely,” Gabriel said.

Merkel and French President Francois Hollande will reopen the question of refugee quotas for individual EU members when they meet in Berlin tomorrow, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in Prague. An earlier effort to assign a firm number of refugees to each EU country failed after a majority of the bloc’s members refused to commit.

Hungary is building a wall along its border with Serbia to prevent refugees from crossing. Denmark in July said it would cut benefits for asylum seekers in a bid to stem their influx. Estonia said it could accept just 150-200 refugees over two years, while U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron this month characterized people trying to enter his country illegally from north Africa as a “swarm.”

Underlining the urgency of countering the EU’s disunity over its refugee problem is a gross miscalculation of the number of people fleeing to the continent from such countries as Syria, Iraq, Eritrea and Afghanistan. As late as May, Germany predicted the number of refugees and asylum seekers entering the country this year at 450,000.

In the same month, the EU Commission called for a fairer and regulated distribution of refugees in the bloc based on quotas, after 40,000 arrived in Italy and Greece. Last month, the 28 states agreed on taking up just 32,256 of them.

Crisis in Macedonia

Macedonia this week deployed its army, and police used stun grenades to stop thousands of migrants from entering the country via Greece, a day after declaring a state of emergency over Europe’s immigration crisis.

German anti-immigration protests outside refugee homes escalated this month, spilling into a violent clash between police and demonstrators this weekend in the town of Heidenau. Gabriel plans to visit the town tomorrow.

Germany is pinning its hopes on EU leaders addressing Europe’s refugee crisis at a West Balkans summit in Vienna on Aug. 27, Gabriel said.

Europe is “somehow in a deep sleep and not coming out of holiday mode” to realize the scale of the crisis, Gabriel said.

(Updates with planned Merkel-Hollande meeting in fifth paragraph.)