BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande called on Monday for a unified response to Europe`s biggest migrant crisis since World War II, as the German leader condemned `vile` protests against refugees.

`We must put in place a unified system for the right to asylum,` Hollande said in a brief statement ahead of talks, calling the influx from the world`s crisis zones `an exceptional situation that will last for some time` `Rather than wait, we should organise and reinforce our policies, and that is what France and Germany are proposing,` he said.

Both countries, like the rest of the EU, have been struggling to ñnd a response to the unprecedented numbers arriving -from the thousands landing on the shores of Greece and Italy to the hundreds risking their lives to climb onto trucks to travel from France to Britain.

Germany, which expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers in 2015, saw antimigrant sentiment rear its head over the weekend as violent protests erupted against a refugee home.

`It is vile for far-right extremists and neo-Nazis to try to spread their hollow, hateful propaganda but it is just as shameful for citizens including families with children to join them` in the protests, said Merkel in her strongest statement to date against a wave of anti-refugee protests to hit eastern Germany.

EU border agency Frontex said last week that a record 107,000 migrants were at thebloc`s borders last month, with 20,800 arriving in Greece last week alone.

In what has become a regular occurrence, Greece`s coastguard said on Monday it recovered the bodies of two migrants who drowned when their boat sank off its shores. Another five were missing.

And at least 2,000 more migrants poured into Serbia overnight from Macedonia on their trek north through Hungary to more prosperous northern European countries like Germany or Sweden.

Macedonia had declared a state of emergency last weel< and closed its border with Greece for three days, with police using stun grenades and batons to stophundreds ofrefugees tryingtobreak throughbarbed wire fencing before apparently deciding to let everyone enter.

Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, who had travelled to the MacedoniaGreece border, called for an urgent new strategy to deal with the crisis.

`It`s a humanitarian disaster, a disaster for the European Union as a whole, and there is a pressing need for us to focus on the situation in the western Balkans,` said Kurz.

With asylum-seekers coming not just from war zones such as Syria but also from countries without military conflict in southeastern Europe, both Hollande and Merkel reiterated their calls for Brussels to draw up a list of safe countries of origin.

Germany in particular sees this as a priority, as 40 per cent of its asylum-seekers come from countries like Albania and Kosovo.-AFP