Then in July 2015 the human side of the migration story burst into the German news in the form of a 14-year-old Palestinian girl whose family had left Lebanon. On a live television programme involving a question-and-answer session between children and the Chancellor in Rostock, this girl told Merkel she was worried that her family might be deported. The Chancellor’s response epitomised the difficulty of meeting natural human sympathy with a wider political problem. She told the girl sitting in front of her that she seemed ‘a very likeable person’. But then she added, ‘Politics is hard.’ Thousands and thousands of other people were also in Lebanon, the Chancellor told her, and if Germany said ‘you can all come’ and everyone from Africa alone came, then she should realise that Germany ‘cannot cope with that’. Merkel promised that cases would be dealt with faster but was clear that some people ‘will have to go back’. Then in the type of gruesomely gripping moment that the producers and presenter clearly realised was about to make all the nightly news programmes, as the Chancellor prepared for another question there was a noise from the young girl. She had begun to cry. Merkel walked over to comfort her. There was a dispute with the presenter, who seemed to be hoping for an on-air amnesty. The huge recent upsurge of migrants from Greece and Italy was clearly on the Chancellor’s mind. But seized by the personal stories, much of the German media criticised Merkel for the ‘coldness’ of her response. This coldness, if that is what it was, soon left her.