I was so saddened to read this morning of the assasination of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands. I'd read an article on him a few months back and have been following some of the stories on him. Not being a Dutch native, I have no idea what the general take on him was in his country but I liked his spirit. I usually don't start these types of threads but since we've been talking about politics in a number of countries I wanted to put in my two bits on him. I don't think it has been yet established that this was a political assassination, but that seems to be a lot of peoples' initial reaction. He was another who was characterized, I believe wrongly, as "extreme right wing" and most of the international and U.S. media are using those terms to now describe him. Reading his biographical details he started out as a Marxist professor of Sociology who later seemed to become more of what would be considered a libertarian populist in the U.S. You may not agree with some or all of his opinions, but my heart aches that he may have been a vicitim of demonization because he was different than the establishment. Follows is an article from the Opinion Journal. Kakki
Pim's Misfortune A Dutch assassination weakens European democracy. BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI Tuesday, May 7, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT The springtime of popular democracy in Europe went from surprising to terribly bloody yesterday in, of all places, the Netherlands. A day after the French peacefully turned away far-right presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen at the ballot box, a gunman murdered the Dutch variety of that political genre, Pim Fortuyn. Dutch voters never got a chance to pass judgement on a man who briefly stirred up their country's staid political scene. Never before had a Dutch politician dared raise taboo subjects of immigration and crime so openly. Never before, in modern Dutch history, had one died at an assassin's hands. After the shooting outside a radio station in Hilversum, police arrested "a white man of Dutch nationality." Nothing immediate was known about his motives or background. But whatever those turn out to be, the shock of Fortuyn's death for the Netherlands--probably for Europe--will be greater than Mr. Le Pen's surprise appearance in the second round of the French elections on Sunday. Fortuyn was an unusual and provocative politician, rare traits on the Continent. When I met him last Tuesday at his house in Rotterdam, he took evident pleasure in polemics and defied easy generalizations about nativism in Europe. His opposition to immigration was never in doubt; neither, it seemed to me, was his respect for the democratic process. The same can't be said for whoever killed him. This former sociology professor and TV personality certainly didn't look the part of the New Ugly European. He was openly gay and favored hip dark jeans and open-necked shirts. His ideas were also somewhat out of step with other ultra-right parties. He argued that Holland's liberal culture--where same-sex marriages, euthanasia and marijuana are all legal--as well as its safe streets and state-funded hospitals, are threatened by new arrivals who reject these Dutch values. His illiberal solution was to close borders to all new immigrants. It's a novel twist on the theme of multiculturalism run amok that has propelled other extremist parties throughout Europe. It worked. Pim Fortuyn's List, his three-month-old bloc, in March threw the long-ruling Labor party out of power in Rotterdam by scooping up 34% of the vote in municipal elections. A recent poll put his party in third place ahead of the May 15 parliamentary elections. Less than a year after launching his political career, Fortuyn looked a likely kingmaker in the next government. Whenever such politicians succeed, the question becomes whether democracy or demagoguery is at work. It's all the more loaded in Europe. Each success for the hard right tends to get viewed through the prism of 1933. "When you talk about the problem of a multiethnic society, they call you names and say you are a Nazi or a Fascist," Fortuyn complained last week, smiling then. (He hated comparisons with the older Mr. Le Pen, whom he called "a petit bourgeois nationalist.") His murder may raise the question whether Europe can handle such open debate. His strident rhetoric no doubt made him enemies. He described himself to me as the "Samuel Huntington of Dutch politics." Earlier this year, he got much political mileage when a local Muslim cleric spoke out against homosexuality--further proof, Fortuyn claimed, of the "backwardness" of Islamic culture. He broke another taboo by proposing the repeal of a constitutional clause against discrimination. "We can say you are welcome as our guests, but you must respect this as our home," he stated. The message, his defenders insisted, was that immigrants must respect laws and traditions of their new countries. After all, the U.S. assimilates newcomers by insisting on allegiance to the Constitution. The appeal of his movement brought worried comment about the threat to the traditional openness of Holland. Yet the Dutch share the anxieties about national identity, rising crime and changing demographics that its neighbors also grapple with. Holland saw the greatest number of anti-Muslim attacks in the EU after Sept. 11. With a 40% minority population, Rotterdam's neighborhoods are growing segregated. Crime is up, even with a booming economy. A debate about how to make the more recent arrivals feel at home in a Europe traditionally defined by blood ties is long overdue. Fortuyn, who never used Le Penesque rhetoric about "expulsions" and "camps" for immigrants, attacked the failure of integration without offering clear answers. But some voters clearly appreciated the interest in their everyday concerns. Fortuyn staged a frontal attack on the consensus model of European politics where left- and right-wing parties have, ever since World War II, tended to differ little from each other. The current center-left Dutch government has been in office since 1994. Before then, the rightish Christian Democrats held power for 77 years--longer than the Soviet Communist Party. Before his death, the Christian Democrats said they could possibly form a coalition government with him. By contrast, mainstream parties in Belgium and France have tried to build a cordon sanitaire around far-right parties. "It's so undemocratic!" Fortuyn said, in mock horror, before launching into an argument that the EU has for too long been run by "elites." He added that he knew, in a democracy, that it is "impossible to implement 100% of my program." In campaigning on ideas--stimulating, outrageous, never dull--Fortuyn made his country's political life richer. His program may have appealed to some baser sentiments, but democracy in Europe will be the weaker for his passing. Mr. Kaminski is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
