Earlier this week in Holland the trial of Volkert van der Graaf started, the murderer of Pim Fortuyn. Most of you will remember that Fortuyn was an up and coming conservative-libertarian who changed the Dutch political landscape with his party List Pim Fortuyn last year. He was killed 9 days before the election by an animal rights and environmental radical whose trial is now underway and I intend to follow the trial over the next few weeks. I think however it is useful to set the stage for that trial and reflect on who Pim Fortuyn really was.

Fortuyn created a political storm in Holland last year by convincingly taking the left-liberal government coalition to task for issues that had started to affect day to day life in Holland. These were issues that up to that point in time had either been covered with the veil of political correctness or had just not been adequately addressed by the ruling coalition or even the opposition. Like North America, Holland was booming in the 1990s and there was a complacent sense that the country was doing well, yet a number of developments in society were starting to eat away at the fundaments on which Holland was built. They included muslim immigration and radicalization of those very muslims, soaring crime rates and a healthcare system that had started to crack under the pressure of long waiting lists. The immigration issue was also an issue at large as Holland’s population density had increased to levels that had started to impact the quality of life in the country. Yet, Fortuyn’ agenda extended well beyond that. His frustration with the huge collective sector that so dominates life in Holland led him to actively promote far reaching privatization, his acceptance speech when he assumed his position as a professor at Erasmus University was entitled “Without Government Employees”. That to a large extent was fed by his experiences with collective, unionized or otherwise organized labor which had and has a very counterproductive grip on many institutions in Holland. Fortuyn had dealt with these issues first hand in the various roles he had before becoming a full-time politician, ranging from senior faculty member to consultant to CEO of a privatized government agency. In a way, Fortuyn was ahead of his time, he believed in a “contract society” that was governed by contracts rather than employment agreements and he believed in the ability of each of us to freely compete in a marketplace governed by these independent contracts rather than centralized top-down agreements. He believed in the flexibility of each individual to develop him or herself to the fullest in such a free society.

His socio-economic views went hand in hand with a liberal stance on sexual and cultural issues. He was openly homosexual and he had ensured that his entire private life was part of the public domain, denying any opportunity to his political opponents to use it against him during the campaign, to the extent that that is possible in Holland. Fortuyn had grown up during the 60s and 70s and was very much aware of the importance of those years for the liberation of women, gays and sexuality in general. While Holland is an extremely tolerant and liberal country, and this is something I hear over and over wherever I go in North America, these freedoms have not come without a fight and Fortuyn was one of the first people in Holland to emphasize that people should continue to fight to defend these very important and unique rights. They are not a given. This is where he clashed with muslims as he rightly became concerned over a radicalized muslim culture fueled by imams preaching in mosques in Holland. They preached the immorality of homosexuality and the belief that homosexuals were sick elements that deserved to be stoned to death. Fortuyn was not a racist, his argument was relatively simple: Holland is pretty full so let’s reduce immigration and to those immigrants that are here we say: fine, this is our country and this is our set of values, if you want to live here please respect them as you would probably ask the same of us if we were living in your country. It is here that he started to split the Dutch left and created a measure of confusion for it was the left that had always stood up for the emancipation of women and gays. Yet at the same time the left had always rejected a debate about immigration and muslim values as an examination of muslim values clashed with their culture of political correctness. Their promotion of a multi-cultural Holland ruled out any questioning of the status and values of strangers in Holland to an extent that some abuse of women, gays and children was ignored as “it was part of another culture”.

To be true, Fortuyn’s love for Holland was also a bit of a weakness. His ideas on foreign policy were not earth shattering and the hordes of foreign journalists that interviewed him had to deal with someone whose command of the English language was, for someone with his intellectual abilities, disappointing. His other weaknesses extended in the interpersonal field. He was not exactly a diplomat and many of his friends and colleagues questioned his ability to see things through to the end. He was also not a big fan of the royal family (this is an understatement), which in Holland is a surefire way to damage yourself politically. It was therefore that there were serious doubts over his ability to lead as Prime Minister, a concern he swept under the carpet with the comment that he would “lead by speech”. Dutch newspapers reported on the day that he was murdered that polls showed his party would be the largest and Fortuyn in that case would have become Prime Minister. I believe that he would have been a credible Prime Minister, and his “management by speech” vision is Reaganesque in its essence, a well-spoken visionary lays out the path surrounding himself with a kitchen cabinet of business leaders and academics with the belief and skill to implement that vision.

It was all a little too uncomfortable for the ruling elites as Fortuyn’s message caught on with the public at large. The establishment had nothing tangible to attack him with during the election campaign, on the contrary, Fortuyn convincingly came out a winner during many of the pre-election debates. So the left-liberal clan resorted to an age old routine: slander. They threw everything at Fortuyn with the idea that some of it would stick and in doing that they were given all the help they could get from the Dutch media notably the NOS, the Dutch equivalent of the BBC and some of the Dutch top newspapers. The slander ranged from calling Fortuyn “Nazi” to comparing him to Mussolini, none of which was even close to the truth, yet as it was coming from people who had long been the respected face of government some of it stuck. What was even more galling to Fortuyn was that senior politicians who had been his friends and whom he had advised behind the scenes (so to some extent he was an ‘established’ politician) started to throw the same abuse in his direction. In one interview by the NOS, Fortuyn quietly laid out some socio-economic numbers on big city populations and his concerns that middle classes were abandoning the big cities in favour of the suburbs to which the interviewer reacted; “and that is something you dare saying on TV ? “, to which Fortuyn replied: “ I am just stating an obvious fact, if I can no longer state simple facts on TV what do you want me to do ? ”. Yet it set the tone and for many uninformed viewers a very unfavorable picture was created. His impeccable dress and confident style was also something that did not go down very well with a large segment of the Dutch population, some of you will remember my comments on the need to stay with the “average mean” in Holland, if you act normal you are considered weird enough. With his bald head and self-assured rants he came across as a conservative James Carville in Savile Row suits with a Hollywood flair for publicity. In Holland, that is completely off the map, beyond comprehension.

The other day I watched a DVD with a collection of weekly interviews Fortuyn gave in the months leading up to this death and I saw a man who was growing increasingly tired and frustrated, who was hounded in a most unreasonable fashion by politicians and media that were hell bent on destroying him. Fortuyn was not always the diplomat, but he was very often, if not always, right, he did not hate, he was open and looked for a “tough debate” yet, what he got in return was hate, invective and disrespectful undeserved slander. Many filed lawsuits against him, all of which were dismissed by the courts and when asked why he did not take some of his opponents to court for hate crimes against him he simply stated that he did not feel that a political debate should be settled in court and felt his arguments were strong enough to settle the case in an open debate. In fact he felt the courts had no jurisdiction in settling political discussions. Yet it all resulted in an incredible amount of stress and the strain showed during these interviews. It hurt me to see that someone who had such a unique message was taken apart in such a vile manner and it still does. Fortuyn did not deserve that.

So the climate of hate, of demonization as some called it, was created and it is impossible to say if that has been directly attributable to his death, yet many believe it played an important role. A report from an independent government commission found that both the government’s security apparatus that is supposed to act on threats to politicians as well as Fortuyn and his associates had failed to adequately address the threats on his life. He was shot 5 times by Van der Graaf shortly after a radio interview in Hilversum, right in the heart of Holland. It appeared Van der Graaf was acting alone, yet his membership of a radical animal rights group has raised serious questions about the planning of the murder.

Politics have gone back to normal yet Fortuyn’s ideas have found their way into the platforms of most political parties. To that extent he changed the Dutch political scene. Yet he paid the ultimate price and it is sometimes depressing to see that the political establishment has gone back to its usual routine. Not too long ago former Prime Minister Kok who was in office when Fortuyn was murdered, commented on Fortuyn’s death. Kok said that he was still haunted by the events surrounding Fortuyn’s murder especially street rallies where he, Kok, was identified as someone who had contributed to the murder. Reading that you have to wonder whether Fortuyn’s death had had any impact on him, as he was apparently more concerned about being implicated in the murder than in the fact that Fortuyn was assassinated. The former leader of the Liberal Party, Dijkstal, in a recent interview was concerned over the effect of Fortuyn on the political debate in the country, “it was possible to discuss everything all of a sudden” he said with disgust. Well, isn’t that the essential part of a democracy? It really is heartbreaking to see how Fortuyn’s legacy is sometimes dealt with in the Dutch media.

For me Fortuyn will always be a symbol of a set of political values that will become increasingly important in years to come. The slow collapse and increasing irrelevance of socialism as a socio-economic model and the changing nature of the “right” has opened the way to a new conservative-libertarian route. Fortuyn was one of its visionaries and he always will be.

May justice be served, Pim.