Not that anyone at the luncheon was unsympathetic. To the contrary, they too saw the rot at the heart of Holland, knew there was cause for protest. What worried them was the expression it would take. Pim Fortuyn, the anti-establishment populist, was taking Dutch politics by storm. Indeed, the latest polls showed he could become a power broker, perhaps even prime minister. None of the guests intended to vote for the man, Wabeke recalls. But they all shared a growing concern. “What if this revolution gets out of hand?”
Little did they know that’s precisely what was about to happen. The next day, just after 6 p.m., Fortuyn left a radio and television studio on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He’d just wound up a two-hour talk-show interview, and he had been at his jaunty best, cracking jokes and winning both support and enmity for his controversial stand on immigration: “Holland is full.” As he strolled across the parking lot to his car, a nondescript man wearing a baseball-style cap approached him, then raised a pistol and fired. The first bullet struck Fortuyn in the neck, several others hit him in the shoulder and chest, another blew off the back of his head.
As Fortuyn lay dying, police arrested Volkert van der Graaf, a 32-year-old animal-rights activist and cofounder of an organization called Milieu Offensief, or Environmental Offensive. He has not yet been charged with the murder, but at van der Graaf’s home in Harderwijk, authorities say they found bullets matching those in Fortuyn’s body, as well as a map of the media complex. At a hotel in nearby Breda, where Fortuyn made a campaign stop earlier in the day, surveillance cameras recorded three men who may have been stalking the candidate; investigators were trying to determine if one of the men was van der Graaf. Among the articles found in the suspected killer’s car were maps of neighborhoods where three other ranking members of Fortuyn’s party lived, according to police reports, suggesting that perhaps he was not the only target for assassination.
On their face, the events in the Netherlands could easily be viewed as the tragic collision of extremes–a threat from the right allegedly gunned down by another from the left. At the time of his death, at 54, Fortuyn was portrayed at home and abroad as just another of Europe’s rising right-wingers. His uncompromising views on immigration, especially Muslims, earned him comparisons to other radicals, most notably France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria’s Jorg Haider. Then along came van der Graaf, looking every inch a stock character from the extreme environmental left, whose natural pacifism was (in this case, allegedly) overpowered by the cause of killing a dangerous public enemy.
It’s a tempting interpretation–but far too simple. In fact, the fate of Pim Fortuyn is a cautionary tale for all of Europe. His assassination exposed the inability of the Continent’s centrist coalition governments, in power since World War II, to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. Fortuyn himself had few answers, and the responses he offered were sometimes ugly. But at least he was responding–in stark contrast to the echoing silence of the political establishment.
Two things should be recognized about Fortuyn. One is that he was less important as a man than for the issues he raised. His flamboyant eccentricity often obscured this. His most un-Dutch Daimler, his multitasking butler-cum-chauffeur, his Italianate villa in Rotterdam, his lifestyle of calculated excess–they all set him up for caricature. On the campaign trail, he offered more of a polemic than a viable program for governance. He knocked the Dutch political establishment back on its heels, not because his sound bites were real solutions but because he spoke “the language of unrest,” as Wabeke puts it. And the people, if not the elites, respected him for that.
What’s more, they liked him, not least because he was the antithesis to Holland’s tradition of consensus politics. In a country where coalition governments are the rule, where issues and disagreements are muted and smoothed over and problems are allowed to fester, Fortuyn seemed a breath of fresh air. Again and again, after his death, voters said: “He spoke his mind.” He talked about real problems, real issues. “He put his finger on the place that hurts,” says Peter Lemeer, a real-estate broker in South Limburg. “A lot of people have been thinking exactly what Pim Fortuyn has been saying.” Yet no one else dared to speak out.
Public reaction to the killing highlighted a second important fact. Not everyone saw Fortuyn as the racist right-winger he was so widely accused of being. The throngs of mourners who flocked to his house in Rotterdam–laying wreaths and lighting candles on his doorstep–were a social rainbow: black and white, Dutch and immigrant, gay and straight, old and young. The same Dutch media that vilified him covered his wake and funeral live, drawing some comparisons to the tributes surrounding the death of Princess Diana. “Pim wasn’t against foreigners,” said one of his faithful, a 26-year-old clerk from Breda, Eny Pamularsih, who emigrated from Indonesia five years ago. “He was against foreigners who didn’t want to adapt or learn Dutch,” unlike herself.
Fortuyn himself insisted as much. “I’m not anti-Muslim. I’m not anti-immigrant,” he insisted to the day of his death. “I’m saying we’ve got big problems in our cities. It’s not smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more.” It’s worth noting that the man Fortuyn appointed as his number two, and who could succeed him, is Joao Varela, 27, a black immigrant from Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the west coast of Africa. Unlike Le Pen, Fortuyn often said, his own rhetoric was not that of hate or prejudice; it was the unaccustomed language of directness. By broaching issues that no one else would touch, Fortuyn broke through the barrier of political correctness that paralyzes not only Dutch politics but most of Europe’s. He showed up the weakness and ineffectuality of the traditional political establishment, says Wabeke. “He’s the man who said, ‘Look, the emperor’s wearing no clothes’.”
Fortuyn’s entire life was politically incorrect. Openly gay, he chafed under his Roman Catholic upbringing. He escaped to the University of Amsterdam just as the countercultural ’60s were getting into full swing. He affected a dandyish look then, and wore three-piece suits amid a sea of jeans and tie-dyed T shirts. After graduation, Fortuyn headed north to teach Marxism at the University of Groningen. A fellow professor and Marxist, Ger Harmsen, recalls with bemusement that Fortuyn’s reading list was odd, given Marx was the subject matter: seven books about Mao, six about Lenin. After another teaching stint, at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University, Fortuyn moved more and more into journalism–and closer to politics. By last year he had become a prominent columnist at the weekly Elsevier. All the while he added to his family wealth. He made a pile of money off books he wrote and from a celebrity speakers’ bureau he co-owned. One day late last year he told his editors that he was leaving to go into politics. At his going-away party he said he wanted to become prime minister. The former editor in chief, Hendrik Schoo, who had hired Fortuyn in 1994, remembers the reaction: “We considered it the biggest joke of the century.”
At first it looked like a joke. Three months ago the Livable Netherlands Party made him party leader. Then he gave an interview in which he rashly said he would abolish portions of the Dutch Constitution guaranteeing certain freedoms–among them speech and religion–that are at the foundation of Netherlands society. He also said he favored a temporary ban in immigration and dismissed Islam as “backward.” All this was in violation of the party’s nondiscrimination policy, so he was thrown out. Speeding away from party headquarters in his Daimler, he yelled out the car window: “And I am still going to be prime minister.”
Almost immediately he formed a party of his own, List Pim Fortuyn, which in March won a stunning 35 percent of the vote in Rotterdam’s municipal elections. Before his death, his fledgling party was expected to get as many as 25 seats out of 150 in Parliament in the May 15 ballot. Given the outpouring of support after his assassination, it may now do better than that.
While Fortuyn was making a name for himself in journalism, his suspected assassin was making his own mark on the Dutch environmental movement. Van der Graaf had lived in the north-central tourist town of Harderwijk for only eight months or so. He had gone there with his partner and their small child, who both went into hiding when van der Graaf was arrested. Something of a cipher to the townspeople, he was well known in the lilac-scented university town of Wageningen. There, van der Graaf helped to start Milieu Offensief a decade ago. In Wageningen, van der Graaf–thin and fair, with short hair, a boyish face and a hardened gaze–first became an activist. According to an interview he gave to the group Animal Freedom (which now disavows him), van der Graaf was disturbed by the way humans treated animals, particularly after he spent time working in the coastal province of Zeeland rescuing birds that had been drenched by an oil spill. He said he was enraged by “the slow and horrible way” the birds died.
Indeed, his frenetic legal challenges to nonorganic factory farmers over their treatment of animals made van der Graaf a standout in Wageningen. He fought land developers before planning boards. He helped take farmers to court, and reportedly some two thirds of the cases he initiated were won. Milieu Offensief’s Web site claims the group brought 2,200 legal cases and complaints against farmers.
This may be where van der Graaf’s cause collided with Fortuyn’s political ambitions. Fortuyn was as contemptuous of green movements as van der Graaf was driven to protect animals. Fortuyn had written, “It is about time we stop moaning about nature and the environment.” Fortuyn may well have angered van der Graaf by adding Wien van den Brink to his list of candidates in the parliamentary election. Van der Graaf had filed many complaints against van den Brink, head of the national pig farmers association. Van der Graaf’s optician, Gaston Gofferje, wonders if Volkert simply snapped. “He saw his whole life’s work, a decade of fighting the farmers, go up [in smoke] before his eyes.” Following van der Graaf’s arrest, police reopened their investigation into the unsolved 1996 shooting death of farm inspector Chris van der Werken because of similarities with Fortuyn’s killing. Van der Graaf had reportedly clashed with van der Werken, claiming he was not tough enough on farmers. As of last Saturday, van der Graaf had made no comment on any of the allegations against him.
In death, Pim Fortuyn is becoming an almost mythical figure. The outpouring of popular emotion–and rage–has triggered a strange hagiography. Newspapers write glowingly about how he had photos of John Kennedy in his office, and how his beloved mother (he named his summer villa in Italy, where he will be buried, after her) warned him not to go into politics. And in all this, there’s enough truth to keep the mythmakers busy.
A friend of Fortuyn’s, Henk Krol, the editor of Gay Krant (Gay News) and himself a prominent figure in the Liberal Party, tells how he, Fortuyn, Fortuyn’s boyfriend and a half dozen others had dinner two years ago in the town of Best, near Eindhoven. It was the time of a summer fair, and after dinner Fortuyn went to see a fortune-teller. He emerged ashen-faced but wouldn’t tell his friends what he had been told. This was before Fortuyn plunged into politics. The friends just laughed it off; it was probably more bad news about Fortuyn’s notoriously disappointing love life, they joked. Then three weeks ago, Fortuyn spoke to Krol about death threats he had been getting, adding: “Now I think I will tell you what the fortune-teller said. She told me that I would end up in an ugly way.”
Among the many ironies surrounding Pim Fortuyn’s death, perhaps the most resounding is that opponents who once demonized the man are themselves coming under fire. Their intemperate, rhetorically charged accusations, many now say, turned him into an assassin’s target. An editorial in the daily newspaper Het Parool (The Word) decried such politicians: “They didn’t pull the trigger, but they pointed the gun in his direction.” Gerrit Komrij, the poet laureate of the Netherlands, wrote a verse titled “The Sitting Member of Parliament,” published in NRC Handelsblad, about the fool who killed the jester. Afterward, like a good politician, the fool practices saying, “I’m shocked!” so that the next day he can repeat it to the media with a straight face.
Amid all this, Judge Wabeke recalls that Sunday luncheon and how important it is for the Dutch to remember more than the man Fortuyn himself. “He was a rebel,” he emphasizes once again. “He said, ‘Damn you–we do have problems’.” Last week the Dutch paid a price for issues not acknowledged–and they’re likely to continue paying. As it comes to grips with itself and the assassination, the Netherlands cannot afford to forget that.
