In death, Fortuyn shakes Dutch election
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) – In death even more than in life, Pim Fortuyn – the dapper, gay, anti-immigration outsider of Dutch politics- is dominating elections for the next government. The country is still trying to measure the aftershocks of Fortuyn’s assassination last week, but one thing is clear. It has left Wednesday’s vote up in the air.
Because he was killed so close to election day, Fortuyn’s name could not be removed from the ballot. With macabre humor, not a few Dutchmen talk about electing a ghost as prime minister.
According to political analysts, though, the election could go either way. Fortuyn’s death could translate into a sympathy/protest vote, or it could turn voters away from his now leaderless Pim Fortuyn’s List.
Fortuyn’s death was an epiphany for the Netherlands, which had viewed itself as a sober, rational, peaceful nation where all disputes, given enough time, can be settled with hardly a raised voice, much less a clenched fist.
“The Netherlands is changing rapidly,” said Gabriel van den Brink, of the Netherlands Institute for Care and Welfare. “That change was the backdrop for Fortuyn’s rise.”
The 54-year-old former academic and magazine columnist emerged from nowhere last year to seize the political stage with abrasive criticism of entrenched leaders whose politics of consensus made them indistinguishable.
He demanded better services from a government that had grown complacent, a crackdown on crime, and an end to further immigration into the Netherlands, Europe’s most crowded country.
He charged that Muslims refused to accept Holland’s secular and liberal traditions, and complained they targeted homosexuals like himself. Islam, he said, was “a backward culture.”
Some immigrants cheered his death, yet many supported him. Immigrants often are the first victims of the crime he pledged to fight. They also are the would-be beneficiaries of his promise to divert funds from new immigration to integrating those already here.
In the last 30 years, van den Brink said in an interview in the Trouw newspaper, politics became a profession, and politicians “failed to see the concerns felt by ordinary people. Fortuyn managed to convey those concerns in plain language. He confronted the political elite. People liked that a lot.”
The Dutch confidence in government and in themselves was undermined in recent years by a series of preventable disasters – an explosion in a fireworks factory, a New Year’s Eve fire in a discotheque. In April, Prime Minister Wim Kok’s Cabinet resigned when a lengthy investigation held the government partly responsible for failing to prevent the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, the Dutch-patrolled area of Bosnia.
In his brief political career, Fortuyn tapped suppressed feelings and thoughts deemed too politically incorrect to express. But it was his death that unleashed an unexpected tide of emotion. Hundreds rioted outside parliament last Monday, the night he was shot five times in the parking lot of a broadcasting studio. Police have charged a 32-year-old animal rights activist with the murder.
On Friday, tens of thousands of people lined the route of his funeral cortege, showering flowers onto the white hearse from the roadside and from overhead highway passes. It was thought to be the biggest funeral since Queen Wilhelmina’s in 1954.
The outpouring of sympathy lent credence to predictions that Fortuyn’s leaderless party might do better in the election than the 17 percent polls gave him before he was killed.
But the latest polls suggest that Fortuyn has gained few followers since his death and that many of his supporters now have doubts about a party deprived of its single personality.
The public disgruntlement that Fortuyn manipulated so successfully can be baffling. In the last decade, the Dutch enjoyed growth, high employment and low inflation that was the envy of Europe.
In contrast to its reputation of generosity toward refugees, the Netherlands has one of the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe. Roughly two of every three people who want to stay are turned away.
“A lot of Dutch people don’t know how severe the law is,” said Brigitta van den Berg, of the Dutch Refugee Council.
A law adopted last year, which prompted riots outside Parliament, requires refugees refused asylum to leave within four weeks. Hundreds of people, including entire families, have since been forcibly repatriated.
The question shadowing Wednesday’s election is whether Fortuyn’s party can survive. Even some of his closest friends and party leaders suggested it disband.
“There’s no way you can keep those people together. They have no common ideology,” said Galen Irwin of Leiden University.
After Fortuyn was killed, the party decided not to choose a new leader until after the election. By the weekend, internal conflicts already were surfacing, with several people claiming the vacant title.
But it is likely Fortuyn’s unschooled successors will be a factor to reckon with in the next parliament, with unpredictable consequences.
“Politics is a profession. They will have to learn it quickly,” said author and Senator Jan Terlouw. “As members of the government or in the opposition, they will find if they don’t adapt to the way things work, there will be problems.”