Twenty-one years ago this week, Pim Fortuyn was being talked of as a future prime minister of Holland. The general election was a week away, and the man described by the Observer as the ‘Gay Mr Right’ had the coalition centre-left government running scared. Everyone from the BBC to the Daily Telegraph to the New York Times was beating a path to the door of the flamboyant 54-year-old former sociology professor.
‘Highly articulate, telegenic, oozing charisma, he has wiped the floor with establishment politicians in TV debates and his views seem to strike a chord with many in the most densely populated country in Europe,’ reported the Observer.
The New York Times visited Rotterdam, where in local elections in March 2002 Fortuyn’s party had become the city’s dominant force. It was intrigued to discover how a bourgeois homosexual could be such a hit in a ‘gritty port…with a reputation for sober, hard-working people’.
Fortuyn laughed off accusations of bigotry from his political opponents
Its correspondent asked around and discovered that the city’s inhabitants were fed up with rising street crime, which some blamed on immigrants. So did Fortuyn, who told the NYT he wanted to halt new arrivals. ‘The country is full up,” he said. ‘We have to slow down and take stock. Too much pressure has built up.’
Both the Observer and the NYT relayed to their readers that Fortuyn had called Islam ‘backward’ because of its attitudes towards homosexuals and gender equality. Fortuyn regularly made this point, including during an interview with the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was to be murdered in 2004 by an Islamist, who objected to a documentary he had made about his religion’s attitude towards women.
Fortuyn laughed off accusations of bigotry from his political opponents. ‘They are trying to make a demon out of me – I’m no fascist or racist,’ he told the Times. ‘It’s outrageous. Obviously, as a homosexual I know about prejudice.’
Two BBC correspondents visited Fortuyn at his extravagantly pretentious house in Rotterdam on separate occasions. Kirsty Lang and John Simpson both drew an angry reaction when they suggested to Fortuyn he had much in common with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front. He’s an antisemite, snapped Fortuyn, and I’m not.
Simpson, in particular, riled Fortuyn, who accused the veteran correspondent of showing him a lack of respect. Simpson replied that he was just doing his job in asking rigorous questions. Displaying a skin of surprising thinness for someone who aspired to high office, Fortuyn cut the interview short.
A few days later, on the evening of May 6, 2002, Fortuyn was shot five times as he left a radio studio on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He had asked for police protection after receiving threats but his request was rejected by Dutch authorities.
‘We’re not yet completely sure, but the most probable (explanation) is that the killer is a psycho,’ a police source told reporters, shortly after a man had been detained.
The assassin was a 32-year-old animal rights extremist called Volkert van der Graaf, who had recently become a father. Psychiatrists who examined van der Graaf in prison concluded he was sane, intelligent and intolerant of people who held opposing views. At his trial, he told the court he assassinated Fortuyn because he disapproved of his remarks about Islam and immigration. Van der Graaf was sentenced to 18 years in prison but was released in 2014.
Fortuyn was probably too vain and volatile to have built a successful political career; he would have got bored with the drudgery of domestic politics and found a new career, perhaps in TV. He loved attention above all else. But his legacy is significant for he was an outlier in Western politics.
In its profile, the Observer described Fortuyn as a ‘demagogue and populist’, someone who had tapped into the grievances of a large swathe of the Dutch population who felt ignored by mainstream politicians. Though his declarations on immigration and Islam captured the headlines, Fortuyn – a fan of Margaret Thatcher – also campaigned on a promise to reduce welfare dependency, improve public services and crack down on crime. Fortuyn also sought to push back the influence of the ‘elite’ and ’technocratic’ E.U.
Simpson wrote a piece about Fortuyn for the Sunday Telegraph in its edition of May 5 2002, the day before his death. He mentioned that he had discussed Fortuyn with Holland’s foreign minister, Jozias van Aartsen, who ‘thinks he will revolutionise Dutch politics’.
And he has, posthumously. Fortuyn inspired a new generation of anti-Establishment political figures, more temperate in their language than the Dutchman but pursuing the same strategy: standing up for the ‘Somewheres’.
That they have been largely successful is as much down to the arrogance of their adversaries. The ‘technocratic elite’ despised by Fortuyn believed that his populism had died with him, and so they carried on as normal. There was no attempt to address the disaffection that had enabled Fortuyn’s rise; on the contrary, his supporters were marginalised even more.
In 2005, French and Dutch voters caused a political earthquake by voting against the EU Constitution in referendums. ‘We must respect what the voters have done, we must also respect the reasons they have given for doing it,’ declared the Guardian. ‘Europe’s politicians have failed to give Europe’s anxious citizens an overarching explanation of how governments can help to manage their place in the globalised market economy.’
But there was no respect. In the years since, these people have been mocked and demonised as ‘swivel-eyed loons, ‘deplorables’, ‘gammons’, ‘fat old racists’, ‘fascists’ and ‘sans dents’ (without teeth). Significantly, it’s no longer just politicians piling in. So do parts of the media, with some journalists dispensing impartiality and failing to bother to hide their contempt for the proles. Such insults have been the most effective recruiting sergeants for Nigel Farage and Brexit, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen and the Sweden Democrats.
‘Pim is dead but his ideas are more alive than ever,’ ran a headline in the Guardian two days after his assassination. That declaration is as true now as it was then. Politicians can be silenced but populism cannot be killed with a bullet.
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