Pim Fortuyn


Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn, was a Dutch politician, academic, author and businessman who formed his own party, Pim Fortuyn List in 2002.
Initially a Marxist and later a member of the Dutch Labour Party, Fortuyn's beliefs began to shift to the right in the 1990s in response to the immigration policies of the Netherlands. Fortuyn prompted controversy with his views on multiculturalism, immigration and Islam in the Netherlands. He called Islam "a backward culture", and was quoted as saying that if it were legally possible, he would close the borders for Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn also supported tougher measures against crime and opposed state bureaucracy, wanting to reduce Dutch financial contribution to the European Union. He was labelled a far-right populist by his opponents and in the media, but he fiercely rejected this label. Fortuyn was openly homosexual and a supporter of gay rights.
Fortuyn explicitly distanced himself from "far-right" politicians such as the Belgian Filip Dewinter, Austrian Jörg Haider, or Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen whenever compared to them. While he compared his own politics to centre-right politicians such as Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Edmund Stoiber of Germany, he also admired former Dutch Prime Minister Joop den Uyl, a social democrat, and Democratic U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Fortuyn also criticised the polder model and the policies of the outgoing government of Wim Kok and repeatedly described himself and LPF's ideology as pragmatic and not populistic. In March 2002, his newly created LPF became the largest party in Fortuyn's hometown Rotterdam during the Dutch municipal elections held that year.
Fortuyn was assassinated during the 2002 Dutch national election campaign by Volkert van der Graaf, a left-wing environmentalist and animal rights activist. In court at his trial, van der Graaf said he murdered Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as "scapegoats" and targeting "the weak members of society" in seeking political power. The LPF went on to poll in second place during the election but went into decline soon after.

Early life and education

Fortuyn was born on 19 February 1948 in Driehuis, as the third child to a middle class Catholic family. His father worked as a salesman and his mother was a housewife. In 1967 he began to study sociology at the University of Amsterdam but transferred after a few months to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In 1971 he ended his study with the Academic degree Doctorandus. In 1981 he received a doctorate in sociology at the University of Groningen as a Doctor of Philosophy.

Career

Fortuyn worked as a lecturer at the Nyenrode Business Universiteit and as an associate professor at the University of Groningen, where he taught Marxist sociology. He was a Marxist at the time. Later, he joined the Labour Party.
In 1989 Fortuyn became director of a government organisation administering student transport cards. In 1990 he moved to Rotterdam. From 1991 to 1995, he was an extraordinary professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, appointed to the Albeda-chair in "employment conditions in public service" and ran an education consultancy business.
When his contract ended, he made a career of public speaking, writing books and press columns, and worked as a weekly columnist for Elsevier. He gradually involved himself in politics through regularly appearing on televised debate shows and became a more familiar public figure. Fortuyn was openly gay, and said in a 2002 interview that he was Catholic.

Political career

In 1992 Fortuyn wrote "Aan het volk van Nederland", declaring he was the successor to the charismatic but controversial 18th-century Dutch politician Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol. A one-time communist and former member of the social-democratic Labour Party, Fortuyn was elected "lijsttrekker" of the newly formed Livable Netherlands party by a large majority on 26 November 2001, prior to the Dutch general election of 2002. Although Fortuyn was initially sympathetic to Marxism and later social democratic causes, his political beliefs began to shift to the right after witnessing what he felt were failed policies on multiculturalism, immigration and crime in Rotterdam, as well as the fact politics and the media were dominated by what he saw as a "left-wing church."
On 9 February 2002, he was interviewed by the Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper. His statements were considered so controversial that the party dismissed him as lijsttrekker the next day. Fortuyn had said that he favoured putting an end to Muslim immigration, if possible and wanted to abolish the "peculiar article" of the Dutch constitution forbidding discrimination.

Founding the LPF

Having been rejected by Livable Netherlands, Fortuyn founded his own party Pim Fortuyn List on 11 February 2002. Many Livable Netherlands supporters and members transferred their support to the new party.
Heading the list of the Livable Rotterdam party, considered to be the local counterpart of the LPF, he achieved a major victory in the Rotterdam municipal council elections in early March 2002. The new party won about 36% of the seats, making it the largest party in the council. For the first time since the Second World War, the Labour Party was out of power in Rotterdam.
Fortuyn's victory made him the subject of hundreds of interviews during the next three months, and he made many statements about his political ideology. In March he released his book The Mess of Eight Purple Years, which criticised the current political system in the Netherlands and was used as his political agenda for the upcoming general election. Purple is the colour to indicate a coalition government consisting of left parties and conservative-liberal parties. The Netherlands had been governed by such a coalition for eight years at that time.
On 14 March 2002, Fortuyn was pied by a left-wing activist from the Biotic Baking Brigade in The Hague. As a result, Fortuyn began to express a fear of being injured or assassinated and accused members of the Dutch political establishment of encouraging violence against him.

Assassination

On 6 May 2002, at age 54, Fortuyn was assassinated by gunshot in Hilversum, North Holland, by Volkert van der Graaf. The attack took place in a parking lot outside a radio studio where Fortuyn had just given an interview. This was nine days before the general election, for which he was running. The attacker was pursued by Hans Smolders, Fortuyn's driver, and was arrested by the police shortly afterward, still in possession of a handgun. Months later, Van der Graaf confessed in court to the first notable political assassination in the Netherlands since 1672, and on 15 April 2003, he was convicted of assassinating Fortuyn and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He was released on parole in May 2014 after serving two-thirds of his sentence, the standard procedure under the Dutch penal system.
The assassination shocked many residents of the Netherlands and highlighted the cultural clashes within the country. Various conspiracy theories arose after Pim Fortuyn's murder and deeply affected Dutch politics and society. Politicians from all parties suspended campaigning. After consultation with LPF, the government decided not to postpone the elections. As Dutch law did not permit modifying the ballots, Fortuyn became a posthumous candidate. The LPF made an unprecedented debut in the House of Representatives by winning 26 seats. The LPF joined a cabinet with the Christian Democratic Appeal and the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, but conflicts in the rudderless LPF quickly collapsed the cabinet, forcing new elections. By the following year, the party had lost support, winning only eight seats in the 2003 elections. It won no seats in the 2006 elections, by which time the Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, had emerged as a successor.
During the last months of his life, Fortuyn had become closer to the Catholic Church. To the surprise of many commentators and Dutch TV hosts, Fortuyn insisted on Fr. Louis Berger, a parish priest from The Hague, accompanying him in some of his last TV appearances. According to the New York Times, Berger had become his "friend and confessor" during the last weeks of his life.
Fortuyn was initially buried in Driehuis in the Netherlands. He was re-interred on 20 July 2002, at San Giorgio della Richinvelda, in the province of Pordenone in Italy, where he had owned a house.

Views on Islam and immigration

When asked about his opposition to Muslim immigration, Fortuyn explained that, "I have no desire to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again." In August 2001, Fortuyn was quoted in the Rotterdams Dagblad newspaper saying, "I am also in favour of a cold war with Islam. I see Islam as an extraordinary threat, as a hostile religion." In the TV program Business class, Fortuyn said that Muslims in the Netherlands did not accept Dutch society; he believed that the religion of Islam was fundamentally intolerant and incompatible with Western values. He said that Muslims in the Netherlands needed to accept living together with the Dutch, and that if this was unacceptable for them, then they were free to leave. His concluding words in the TV program were "... I want to live together with the Muslim people, but." Fortuyn also maintained that he did not object to Muslim immigrants because of their race or ethnicity, but for what he saw as lack of integration and unwillingness to adapt to Dutch standards of modernity and social liberalism.

On 9 February 2002, additional statements made by him were carried in the Volkskrant. He said that the Netherlands, with a population of 16 million, had enough inhabitants, and the practice of allowing as many as 40,000 asylum-seekers into the country each year had to be stopped. The actual number for 2001 was 27,000, down slightly on the previous year. He claimed that if he became part of the next government, he would pursue a restrictive immigration policy while also granting citizenship to a large group of illegal immigrants.
He said that he did not intend to "unload our Moroccan hooligans" onto the Moroccan King Hassan. Hassan had died three years earlier. He considered Article 7 of the constitution, which asserts freedom of speech, of more importance than Article 1, which forbids discrimination on the basis of religion, life principles, political inclination, race, or sexual preference. Fortuyn distanced himself from Hans Janmaat of the Centrum Democraten, who in the 1980s wanted to remove all foreigners from the country and was repeatedly convicted for discrimination and hate speech.
Fortuyn proposed that all people who already resided in the Netherlands would be able to stay, but he emphasized the need of the immigrants to adopt Dutch society's consensus on human rights as their own. He said "If it were legally possible, I'd say no more Muslims will get in here", claiming that the influx of Muslims would threaten freedoms in the liberal Dutch society. He thought Muslim culture had never undergone a process of modernisation and therefore still lacked acceptance of democracy and women's, gays', lesbians' and minorities' rights.
When asked by the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant whether he hated Islam, he replied:
I don't hate Islam. I consider it a backward culture. I have travelled much in the world. And wherever Islam rules, it's just terrible. All the hypocrisy. It's a bit like those old Reformed Protestants. The Reformed lie all the time. And why is that? Because they have standards and values that are so high that you can't humanly maintain them. You also see that in that Muslim culture. Then look at the Netherlands. In what country could an electoral leader of such a large movement as mine be openly homosexual? How wonderful that that's possible. That's something that one can be proud of. And I'd like to keep it that way, thank you very much.

Fortuyn used the word achterlijk, literally meaning "backward", but commonly used as an insult in the sense of "retarded". After his use of "achterlijk" caused an uproar, Fortuyn said he had used the word with its literal meaning of "backward".
Fortuyn wrote Against the Islamization of Our Culture .

Fortuynism

The ideology or political style that is derived from Pim Fortuyn, and in turn the LPF, is often called Fortuynism. Observers variously saw him as a political protest targeting the alleged elitism and bureaucratic style of the Dutch purple coalitions or as offering an appealing political style. The style was characterized variously as one "of openness, directness and clearness", populism or simply as charisma. Another school holds Fortuynism as a distinct ideology, with an alternative vision of society. Some argued that Fortuynism was not just one ideology, but contained liberalism, populism and nationalism.
During the 2002 campaign, Fortuyn was accused of being on the "extreme right", although others saw only certain similarities. While he employed anti-immigration rhetoric, he was neither a radical nationalist nor a defender of traditional authoritarian values. On the contrary, Fortuyn wanted to protect the socio-culturally liberal values of the Netherlands, women's rights and sexual minorities, from the "backward" Islamic culture. He held liberal views favouring the drug policy of the Netherlands, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and related positions.
The LPF also won support from some ethnic minorities; one of Fortuyn's closest associates was of Cape Verdean origin, and one of the party's MPs was a young woman of Turkish descent. The LPF also contained the first elected Dutch MP of Chinese heritage.
His ideology can be comprised in the following positions:
Fortuyn was compared with the politicians Jörg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen in the foreign press. These comparisons were often referred to by Dutch reporters and politicians. An explicit comparison with Le Pen was made by Ad Melkert, then lijsttrekker of the Labour Party, who said in Emmen on 24 April 2002: "If you flirt with Fortuyn, then in the Netherlands the same thing will happen as happened in France. There they woke up with Le Pen, soon we will wake up with Fortuyn."
On 5 May, the day before the assassination, Fortuyn in a debate with Melkert organized by the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper claimed that he was demonized. In it he said that he often had to tell journalists that the image created of him in the media was incorrect.
Columnist Jan Blokker wrote that "fter reading I realized once again that Professor Pim may really be called the Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Filip Dewinter, the Jörg Haider and the new Hans Janmaat of the Netherlands." Prime Minister Wim Kok accused Fortuyn of stirring up fear and stimulating xenophobia among the Dutch people. In the run-up to the 2002 election, GroenLinks leader Paul Rosenmöller claimed Fortuyn's policies were "not just right but extreme right".
Fortuyn often responded to criticism by stating that his views were misunderstood or distorted by the media, and in turn rejected comparisons and expressed his personal distaste for radical far-right politicians in other European countries. In an interview on the Dutch talk show Jensen! that was broadcast shortly before his death, Fortuyn accused members of the Dutch government and political establishment of putting his life in danger through repeatedly demonizing him and his beliefs.

Legacy

Fortuyn changed the Dutch political landscape. The 2002 elections, only weeks after Fortuyn's death, were marked by large losses for the liberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy and especially the social democratic Labour Party ; both parties replaced their leaders shortly after their losses. The election winners were the Pim Fortuyn List, and the Christian democratic Christian Democratic Appeal. Some commentators in the mainstream political class speculated that Fortuyn's perceived martyrdom created greater support for the LPF, hence that party's brief surge to 17% of the electoral vote and 26 of the 150 seats in the Dutch Parliament. Although the LPF was able to form a coalition with the Christian Democratic Appeal and the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, it was bereft with internal strife and quickly lost steam. The coalition cabinet of Jan Peter Balkenende fell within three months, due to infighting within the LPF. In the following elections, the LPF was left with only eight seats in parliament and was not included in the new government. Political commentators speculated that discontented voters might vote for a non-traditional party, if a viable alternative was at hand. Later, the right-wing Party for Freedom, which has a strong stance on immigration, proposing to deport criminal, unemployed or not assimilated non-western immigrants, won nine seats in the 2006 elections and peaked at 24 in 2010.
The Netherlands has made its asylum policy more strict. Opponents of Fortuynism, such as Paul Rosenmöller, Thom de Graaf, and Ad Melkert, have objected to what they think is a harsher political and social climate, especially towards immigrants and Muslims.
Other commentators such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Starkey and Douglas Murray have retrospectively defended some of Fortuyn's beliefs. Former Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende also stated that he later agreed with some of Fortuyn's criticisms of multiculturalism and the purple coalition under Wim Kok.
Contemporary Dutch politics is more polarized than it has been in recent years, especially on the issues for which Fortuyn was best known. People debate the success of their multicultural society, and whether they need to better assimilate newcomers. The government's decision in 2004 to more strictly expel asylum seekers whose applications had failed was controversial. Fortuyn had advocated for a one-time amnesty for those asylum seekers who had resided in the Netherlands for an extended period.
In 2004, in a TV show, Fortuyn was chosen as De Grootste Nederlander, followed closely by William of Orange, the leader of the independence war that established the precursor to the present-day Netherlands. The election was not considered representative, as it was held by viewers' voting through the internet and by phoning in. Theo van Gogh had been murdered a few days before by a Muslim, which likely affected people's voting in the TV contest for Fortuyn. The program later revealed that William of Orange had received the most votes, but many could not be counted until after the official closing time of the television show, due to technical problems. The official rules of the show said that votes counted before the end of the show would be decisive, but it was suggested that all votes correctly cast before the closing of the vote would be counted. Following the official rules, the outcome was not changed.
where Fortuyn was assassinated
Right-wing politicians gained greater public influence after Fortuyn's death, such as former Minister for Integration & Immigration Rita Verdonk, the prominent critic of Islam, Member of the House of Representatives Geert Wilders who in 2006 formed the Party for Freedom and Thierry Baudet, leader of the Forum for Democracy party. These politicians often focus on the debate over cultural assimilation and integration.
Supporters of Fortuyn went on to set up the annual Pim Fortuyn Prize which is awarded to opinion makers, politicians or commentators who best convey the ideas of Pim Fortuyn. Winners have included Ebru Umar and John van den Heuvel.

Selected publications