<p>Helping refugees, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared this week, is "no more or less than a moral imperative". She received a nine-minute standing ovation. But FRANCE 24’s Douglas Herbert sees the mood souring against migrants.</p><br />It’s been just 14 weeks since the photo of a 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, lying lifeless on a Turkish beach triggered a global outpouring of compassion for the plight of migrants.<br />The image, shared around the globe, prompted a surge in donations to refugee charities. Here in France, President François Hollande phoned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And Canada’s then-prime minister, Stephen Harper, was suddenly put on the defensive over his conservative government’s refugee policy in a federal election campaign that he would ultimately lose to Liberal Justin Trudeau.<br />(Canadian immigration authorities had reportedly turned down a pervious asylum application by Aylan’s uncle; Trudeau, meanwhile, repeated an earlier, pre-campaign promise to take in 25,000 Syrian refugees.)<br />What a difference 14 weeks makes.<br />Since that late-summer bout of sympathy, the mood towards migrants – when we think of them at all – has turned markedly more abrasive, and acerbic.<br />Facing down a revolt<br />The November 13 attacks here in Paris have injected an added note of fear and suspicion about strangers from strange lands.<br />Angela Merkel, fresh from being named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, has faced down a threatened revolt from hardliners within her own Christian Democratic Union party over her open-door migrant policy.<br />But given the enormous pressure she’s under – her finance minister likened his leader to a “careless s... Go on reading on our web site.<br />Visit our website:<br />http://www.france24.com<br /><br />Like us on Facebook:<br />https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English<br /><br />Follow us on Twitter:<br />https://twitter.com/France24_en
