ANGELA MERKEL BECOMES THE ANGEL OF MERCY.

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel is being hailed as an angel of mercy and her country as a paragon of virtue for flinging open the doors to a massive influx of refugees. The sight of Germans whooping in welcome and thrusting gifts at bedraggled asylum seekers arriving on chartered trains has stood in sharp contrast to the indifference or outright hostility directed at them in other European nations. Some Germans hope that such positive images might help remove some of the stains on their reputation, including older, darker associations with trains full of unwanted people – those who were systematically sent to their deaths by the Nazis. Mrs Merkel said she was moved by the sight of hundreds of migrants stuck at a railway station in Hungary last week, chanting their desire to come to Germany. German officials say they are prepared to accept as many as 800,000 asylum seekers this year, a number equal to 1 per cent of the population. The government announced on Monday that it would set aside $US6.7 billion ($9.6 billion) next year to deal with the influx. Mrs Merkel is working with the EU's other main power, France, to come up with a solution to the biggest migrant crisis to hit the region since World War II. The two partners have agreed on a proposal, to be unveiled on Wednesday, to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers among EU nations based on each country's size and economic strength. But there's unease here as well: over how far the country's resources can be stretched, over the backlash already brewing in some areas and over Germany's being a leader and an outlier in the crisis, even if laudably so. Hundreds of refugees and migrants continued to push their way north from the Balkans into Hungary en route to their preferred destinations of Germany and Sweden. They broke out of a receiving centre on the Hungary-Serbia border, then began walking north along one of Hungary's main highways, Sunday Morning Herald