RUTHFULLY YOURS

France — Fact is stranger than fiction. In France, doubly so. On the day I leave for Paris, the following headline adorns Le Monde’s front page: “Fillon Received $50,000 to Introduce a Lebanese Industrialist to Putin.”

Alors. A scandal to mar the French election. Anything less and they wouldn’t really be trying, would they? Of all the world’s political gods, those that serve the French are the most puckish.

And yet, the persistent rumors that have engulfed François Fillon are, in truth, the least interesting thing about this extraordinary election cycle. That Fillon’s descent has left a gaping political void is interesting, certainly. But what’s really fascinating is how it’s being filled. Late last year, it seemed all but certain that France would have a sensible, center-right president of the sort you could take home to your mother. Today? Heaven only knows.

On paper, Fillon was perfectly placed. He had the experience, having been prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, and he had the novelty value, having become the North Star of a new French conservatism that has embraced Catholicism in spite of laïcité, turned happily toward “Anglo-Saxon” free markets, and even rebranded its flagship party as “the Republicans.” In addition, he was well suited to bridge the gap between the sects in a country that remains as divided as ever — “How,” Charles de Gaulle asked, “can you govern a country that has 246 different sorts of cheese?” — but has become steadily more right-leaning as the years have gone by. Astonishingly for a French politician, Fillon is running on a platform would be familiar to voters in the United States: Inter alia, he wants to reduce the number of civil servants, abolish France’s “wealth tax,” abolish the 35-hour work week, reform the health-care system, and raise the retirement age; and, while he has promised to protect the legal status quo, he is vocally pro-life and opposed to gay marriage. For once, the stars seemed to have aligned: The most credible, electable option was also the most sound.

But, damn those puckish gods, it was not to be. And, alas, the alternatives to Fillon are markedly less appealing than is he. There is Marine Le Pen of the Front National (FN), who, despite having distanced herself from her father and swapped open-handed racism for implication-heavy populism, is still rather unpleasant. There is Benoît Hamon, the most left-wing candidate within the Parti Socialiste, whose big ideas are to tax robots and to add a universal basic income on top of France’s creaking welfare state. There is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a cerebral left-leaner whose destiny is to be the best-spoken also-ran in French history. And there is Emmanuel Macron, a self-described post-ideological moderate who is a leading contender for Luckiest Man in France.

Macron, an independent with no party apparatus around him, is a former Rothschild banker who at one point seemed destined to be a footnote but after Fillon’s implosion is now the odds-on favorite to win the whole thing. Perilously untested, chronically vacuous, and ostensibly tarred by his work under the incumbent president, François Hollande (the most unpopular the Fifth Republic has ever had), Macron nevertheless seems set to take the lion’s share of a political middle that is sorely lacking in credible representatives. Cosmopolitan, pro-immigration, and publicly insistent that “there is no such thing as French culture,” Macron is precisely of whom Marine Le Pen is thinking when she lambastes the “savage globalization that has been a nightmare” for France.

Politically, France is in a bad place. Under Hollande’s feckless leadership, the country has been attacked from both without and within and seen an average of 1 percent growth for almost half a decade. Unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds is now at a staggering 25 percent and has led to an exodus that has rendered London the sixth-largest French-speaking city in the world. The reflexively proud French are no longer sure that they have a future. They are afraid for their economy. They are afraid of immigration. They are afraid of technology. There is, almost everywhere you go, a tangible sense of ennui. It is an uncertainty that does not suit the people that produced de Gaulle.

BELGRADE, Serbia—Serbs voted Sunday in a presidential election that was a test of their prime minister’s authoritarian rule amid growing Russian influence in the Balkan region.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, a former ultranationalist now a declared pro-European Union politician, is slated to win the presidency by a high margin against 10 opposition candidates, including a parody candidate who is mocking the country’s political establishment.

Mr. Vucic’s political clout could face a blow, however, if he doesn’t sweep his opponents in the first round of voting.

Mr. Vucic needs to win by more than 50% of the vote Sunday to avoid a runoff election on April 16 that would put him in a much trickier position against a single opposition candidate.

His main challengers in the vote include human-rights lawyer and former ombudsman Sasa Jankovic, former Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic and firebrand nationalist and Mr. Vucic’s former mentor, Vojislav Seselj, who has been tried for war crimes.

The opposition has accused Mr. Vucic of muzzling the media and intimidating voters ahead of the election. Mr. Vucic denies such accusations, saying only he can bring stability to a region scarred by the wars of the 1990s, which Mr. Vucic had supported at the time.

“I really hope that with these elections, Serbia will carry on toward its further stability with full support of its government,” Mr. Vucic said as he cast his ballot. “I don’t know if I’ll win, but I truly hope that those who want to destabilize Serbia will not succeed.” CONTINUE AT SITE

One year ago today, Turkish President Recep Erdogan was in the Washington, D.C. area to open a new $100 million mosque complex funded by the Turkish government and operated by the Diyanet, Turkey’s religious affairs ministry.

Needless to say, the opening of the Diyanet complex received national and international media attention:But on the one-year anniversary of the opening of the Diyanet Center of America, questions about its true purpose are being raised. There are ongoing investigations by European officials into widespread spying allegations implicating Turkish government-funded Diyanet mosques across the continent — just like the one opened outside of Washington, D.C. The investigations center on whether the mosques are spying on behalf of the the Turkish intelligence service, the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT).

Yesterday I reported here at PJ Media on the investigations in Germany, where authorities have conducted raids targeting Diyanet imams and high-ranking officers of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), the official arm of the Diyanet in Germany.

In Germany there are 900 Diyanet mosques and 970 employees serving the three million German nationals of Turkish origin or Turkish citizens living there, representing 70 percent of the German Muslim community.

There, DITIB officials have recently admitted spying on behalf of Turkish intelligence.And it was reported yesterday that a German government probe of senior DITIB officials had been launched into the spying affair.

That is just the tip of the iceberg, however.

Spying affair investigations into Diyanet mosques and imams are reportedly ongoing in Belgium, Holland, Austria, France and Switzerland, and some Diyanet officials have returned to Turkey as the government probes in these countries continue.

In his 1941 review titled “No, Not One” of Alex Comfort’s novel No Such Liberty, George Orwell explains that the protagonist of the story is put before a tribunal because he has “declared that he will not fight against the Nazis, thinking it better to ‘overcome Hitler by love.'”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Notwithstanding the bestial attacks in Germany, the carnage against Christians throughout the world, the brutal rapes and assaults being propagated by jihadist “refugees,” the institution of child marriage throughout the Islamic world, the frightening increase in global anti-Semitism, and the censoring of free speech, it is clear that Orwell’s prescient essay needs to be reiterated as he asks that we “consider … facts which underlie the structure of modern society and which it is necessary to ignore if the pacifist ‘message’ is to be accepted uncritically.”

Orwell asserts that “civilisation rests ultimately on coercion. What holds society is not the policeman but the good will of common men, and yet that good will is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up. Any government which refuse[s] to use violence in its own defence would cease almost immediately to exist[.]”

Yet we see Germany, France, and Sweden unraveling because the police have lost control as Muslim communities become no-go zones and law and order are abandoned. Soeren Kern describes the more “than 40 problem areas” (Problemviertel) across Germany. These are areas where “large concentrations of migrants, high levels of unemployment, and chronic welfare dependency, combined with urban decay, have become incubators for anarchy.” In fact, “the problem of no-go zones is especially acute in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous state.”

Speaking of the Nazi scourge, Orwell maintains that “since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it.”

Fast-forward to the jihadist scourge that besets the world today. Does not pacifism, by default, become pro-jihadist? Shall we call it pacifism of the soul that the Netherlands finds a courageous man like Geert Wilders guilty of free speech for pointing out the dangers of the Muslim immigration?

Orwell also takes great issue with the “calculated campaign of deception” of news media and asserts that “no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” He emphasizes that it gives him “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.” Echoes of fake news, indeed!